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opyright No.. 



LIB 

Chap. 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



Shell... 




Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2011 with funding from 
The Library of Congress 



http://www.archive.org/details/beingboy04warn 




FISHING ON THE SWIMMING ROCK (page 169) 



, 



Being a Boy 

by 
Charles Dudley- 
Warner 




With Illustrations 

from Photographs 

by Clifton Johnson 



Boston and New York 
Houghton, Mifflin and Company 

Mdcccxcvii 




TWO COPIES RECEIVED 



> 



A L 






COPYRIGHT, 1877, BY JAMES R. OSGOOD AND CO. 

1897, BY HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND CO. 

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 






CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Preface to the Illustrated Edition . . vii 

I. Being a Boy ....... i 

II. The Boy as a Farmer .... 8 

III. The Delights of Farming ... 15 

IV. No Farming without a Boy ... 22 
V. The Boy's Sunday 30 

VI. The Grindstone of Life ... 38 

VII. Fiction and Sentiment .... 47 

VIII. The Coming of Thanksgiving . . 56 

IX. The Season of Pumpkin-Pie ... 65 

X. First Experience of the World . j^ 

XI. Home Inventions 82 

XII. The Lonely Farm-House ... 92 

XIII. John's First Party 101 

XIV. The Sugar Camp 113 

XV. The Heart of New England . . .123 

XVI. John's Revival 134 

XVII. War . . . . . . . . .150 

XVIII. Country Scenes. ..... 164 

XIX. A Contrast to the New England Boy . 179 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



Fishing on the Swimming Rock (see page i( 



Being a Boy .'.... 

* The Farm Oxen 

* At the Pasture Bars 

v In the Cattle Pasture 
i After a Crow's Nest 

A String of Speckled Trout 

Watching for Sunset 
4 Riding Bareback 

Turning the Grindstone 

* Snaring Suckers 

« Picking up Potatoes . 
-. Leap-frog at Recess 

Pounding off Shucks 

Running on the Stone Wall 

Coasting . 

In School ..... 

A Remote Farmhouse 

Going Home with Cynthia . 

A Young Sugar Maker . 

Watching the Kettles 

The Village from the Hill . 

Treeing a Woodchuck . 

Looking for Frogs . 

Trout Fishing .... 

Forced to go to Bed 



Frontispiece. 






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28 


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36 


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58 


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74 


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92 


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118 


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120 


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126 


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132 


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136 


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140 


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146 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

Slippery Work ....... .166 

Rigging up the Fishing-Tackle . .168 

Watching the Fishes . . . - - • 1 7° 

Entering the Old Bridge • J 78 

The Old Watering Trough . ' • • .180 

The New England Boy l8 4 

vi 



PREFACE TO THE ILLUSTRATED 
EDITION 

This volume was first published over 
twenty years ago. If any of the boys de- 
scribed in it were real, they have long since 
grown up, got married, gone West, become 
selectmen or sheriffs, gone to Congress, 
invented an electric churn, become editors 
or preachers or commercial travelers, writ- 
ten a book, served a term as consul to a 
country the language of which they did not 
know, or plodded along on a farm, culti- 
vating rheumatism and acquiring invalu- 
able knowledge of the most fickle weather 
known in a region which has all the fasci- 
nation and all the power of being disagree- 
able belonging to the most accomplished 
coquette in the world. 

vii 



PREFACE TO THE ILLUSTRATED EDITION 

The rural life described is that of New 
England between 1830 and 1850, in a 
period of darkness, before the use of lucifer 
matches ; but when, although religion had a 
touch of gloom and all pleasure was height- 
ened by a timorous apprehension that it 
was sin, the sun shone, the woods were full 
of pungent scents, nature was strong in its 
invitations to cheerfulness, and girls were 
as sweet and winsome as they are in the 
old ballads. 

The object of the papers composing the 
volume — though "object" is a strong 
word to use about their waywardness — 
was to recall scenes in the boy-life of New 
England, or the impressions that a boy had 
of that life. There was no attempt at the 
biography of any particular boy ; the expe- 
riences given were common to the boyhood 
of the time and place. While the book, 
therefore, was not consciously biographical, 
it was of necessity written out of a personal 

viii 



PREFACE TO THE ILLUSTRATED EDITION 

knowledge. And I may be permitted to 
say that, as soon as I became conscious 
that I was dealing with a young life of the 
past, I tried to be faithful to it, strictly so, 
and to import into it nothing of later expe- 
rience, either in feeling or performance. I 
invented nothing, — not an adventure, not 
a scene, not an emotion. I know from 
observation how difficult it is for an adult 
to write about childhood. Invention is apt 
to supply details that memory does not 
carry. The knowledge of the man insen- 
sibly inflates the boyhood limitations. The 
temptation is to make a psychological analy- 
sis of the boy's life and aspirations, and 
to interpret them according to the man's 
view of life. It seems comparatively easy 
to write stories about boys, and even bio- 
graphies ; but it is not easy to resist the 
temptation of inventing scenes to make 
them interesting, indulging in exaggera- 
tions both of adventure and of feeling 

ix 



PREFACE TO THE ILLUSTRATED EDITION 

which are not true to experience, invent- 
ing details impossible to be recalled by 
the best memory, and states of mind which 
are psychologically untrue to the boy's con- 
sciousness. 

How far I succeeded in keeping the man 
out of the boy's life, my readers can judge 
better than the writer. The volume origi- 
nally made no sensation — how could it, 
pitched in such a key ? — but it has gone 
on peacefully, and, I am glad to acknow- 
ledge, has made many valuable friends. It 
started a brook, and a brook it has con- 
tinued. In sending out this new edition 
with Mr. Clifton Johnson's pictures, lov- 
ingly taken from the real life and heart of 
New England, I may express the hope 
that the boy of the remote generation will 

lose no friends. 

C. D. W. 
Hartford, May 8, 1897. 



BEING A BOY 



BEING A BOY 



One of the best things in the world to be 
is a boy ; it requires no experience, though 
it needs some practice to be a good one. 
The disadvantage of the position is that it 
does not last long enough ; it is soon over ; 
just as you get used to being a boy, you 
have to be something else, with a good deal 
more work to do and not half so much fun. 
And yet every boy is anxious to be a man, 
and is very uneasy with the restrictions that 
are put upon him as a boy. Good fun as it 
is to yoke up the calves and play work, there 
is not a boy on a farm but would rather drive 
a yoke of oxen at real work. What a glori- 
ous feeling it is, indeed, when a boy is for 
the first time given the long whip and per- 



BEING A BOY 

mitted to drive the oxen, walking by their 
side, swinging the long lash, and shouting 
" Gee, Buck ! " " Haw, Golden ! " " Whoa, 
Bright ! " and all the rest of that remark- 
able language, until he is red in the face, 
and all the neighbors for half a mile are 
aware that something unusual is going on. 
If I were a boy, I am not sure but I would 
rather drive the oxen than have a birthday. 
The proudest day of my life was one day 
when I rode on the neap of the cart, and 
drove the oxen, all alone, with a load of 
apples to the cider-mill. I was so little, 
that it was a wonder that I did n't fall off, 
and get under the broad wheels. Nothing 
could make a boy, who cared anything for 
his appearance, feel flatter than to be run 
over by the broad tire of a cart-wheel. But 
I never heard of one who was, and I don't 
believe one ever will be. As I said, it was 
a great day for me, but I don't remember 
that the oxen cared much about it. They 
sagged along in their great clumsy way, 
switching their tails in my face occasionally, 
and now and then giving a lurch to this or 
that side of the road, attracted by a choice 




BEING A BOY 



BEING A BOY 

tuft of grass. And then I "came the Julius 
Caesar" over them, if you will allow me 
to use such a slang expression, a liberty 
I never should permit you. I don't know 
that Julius Caesar ever drove cattle, though 
he must often have seen the peasants from 
the Campagna "haw" and "gee" them 
round the Forum (of course in Latin, a lan- 
guage that those cattle understood as well 
as ours do English) ; but what I mean is, 
that I stood up and " hollered " with all my 
might, as everybody does with oxen, as if 
they were born deaf, and whacked them 
with the long lash over the head, just as 
the big folks did when they drove. I think 
now that it was a cowardly thing to crack 
the patient old fellows over the face and 
eyes, and make them wink in their meek 
manner. If I am ever a boy again on a 
farm, I shall speak gently to the oxen, and 
not go screaming round the farm like a 
crazy man ; and I shall not hit them a 
cruel cut with the lash every few minutes, 
because it looks big to do so and I cannot 
think of anything else to do. I never liked 
lickings myself, and I don't know why an 

3 



BEING A BOY 

ox should like them, especially as he cannot 
reason about the moral improvement he is 
to get out of them. 

Speaking of Latin reminds me that I 
once taught my cows Latin. I don't mean 
that I taught them to read it, for it is very 
difficult to teach a cow to read Latin or any 
of the dead languages, — a cow cares more 
for her cud than she does for all the classics 
put together. But if you begin early you 
can teach a cow, or a calf (if you can teach 
a calf anything, which I doubt), Latin as 
well as English. There were ten cows, 
which I had to escort to and from pasture 
night and morning. To these cows I gave 
the names of the Roman numerals, begin- 
ning with Unus and Duo, and going up to 
Decern. Decern was of course the biggest 
cow of the party, or at least she was the 
ruler of the others, and had the place of 
honor in the stable and everywhere else. 
I admire cows, and especially the exactness 
with which they define their social position. 
In this case, Decern could "lick" Novem, 
and Novem could "lick" Octo, and so on 
down to Unus, who could n't lick anybody, 

4 



BEING A BOY 

except her own calf. I suppose I ought to 
have called the weakest cow Una instead 
of Unus, considering her sex ; but I did n't 
care much to teach the cows the declen- 
sions of adjectives, in which I was not very 
well up myself ; and besides it would be 
of little use to a cow. People who devote 
themselves too severely to study of the 
classics are apt to become dried up ; and 
you should never do anything to dry up 
a cow. Well, these ten cows knew their 
names after a while, at least they appeared 
to, and would take their places as I called 
them. At least, if Octo attempted to get 
before Novem in going through the bars (I 
have heard people speak of a "pair of bars " 
when there were six or eight of them), or 
into the stable, the matter of precedence 
was settled then and there, and once settled 
there was no dispute about it afterwards. 
Novem either put her horns into Octo's 
ribs, and Octo shambled to one side, or 
else the two locked horns and tried the 
game of push and gore until one gave up. 
Nothing is stricter than the etiquette of a 
party of cows. There is nothing in royal 

5 



BEING A BOY 

courts equal to it ; rank is exactly settled, 
and the same individuals always have the 
precedence. You know that at Windsor 
Castle, if the Royal Three-Ply Silver Stick 
should happen to get in front of the Most 
Royal Double - and - Twisted Golden Rod, 
when the court is going in to dinner, some- 
thing so dreadful would happen that we 
don't dare to think of it. It is certain that 
the soup would get cold while the Golden 
Rod was pitching the Silver Stick out of 
the castle window into the moat, and per- 
haps the island of Great Britain itself would 
split in two. But the people are very care- 
ful that it never shall happen, so we shall 
probably never know what the effect would 
be. Among cows, as I say, the question is 
settled in short order, and in a different 
manner from what it sometimes is in other 
society. It is said that in other society 
there is sometimes a great scramble for the 
first place, for the leadership as it is called, 
and that women, and men too, fight for 
what is called position ; and in order to be 
first they will injure their neighbors by tell- 
ing stories about them and by backbiting, 

6 



BEING A BOY 

which is the meanest kind of biting there 
is, not excepting the bite of fleas. But in 
cow society there is nothing of this detrac- 
tion in order to get the first place at the 
crib, or the farther stall in the stable. If 
the question arises, the cows turn in, horns 
and all, and settle it with one square fight, 
and that ends it. I have often admired this 
trait in cows. 

Besides Latin, I used to try to teach the 
cows a little poetry, and it is a very good 
plan. It does not benefit the cows much, 
but it is excellent exercise for a boy farmer. 
I used to commit to memory as many short 
poems as I could find (the cows liked to 
listen to Thanatopsis about as well as any- 
thing), and repeat them when I went to the 
pasture, and as I drove the cows home 
through the sweet ferns and down the rocky 
slopes. It improves a boy's elocution a 
great deal more than driving oxen. 

It is a fact, also, that if a boy repeats 
Thanatopsis while he is milking, that opera- 
tion acquires a certain dignity. 

7 



II 

THE BOY AS A FARMER 

Boys in general would be very good 
farmers if the current notions about farm- 
ing were not so very different from those 
they entertain. What passes for laziness 
is very often an unwillingness to farm in a 
particular way. For instance, some morn- 
ing in early summer John is told to catch 
the sorrel mare, harness her into the spring 
wagon, and put in the buffalo and the best 
whip, for father is obliged to drive over to the 
" Corners, to see a man " about some cattle, 
or talk with the road commissioner, or go 
to the store for the "women folks," and to 
attend to other important business ; and 
very likely he will not be back till sundown. 
It must be very pressing business, for the 
old gentleman drives off in this way some- 
where almost every pleasant day, and ap- 
pears to have a great deal on his mind. 

8 




AT THE PASTURE BARS 



THE BOY AS A FARMER 

Meantime, he tells John that he can play 
ball after he has done up the chores. As 
if the chores could ever be "done up " on a 
farm. He is first to clean out the horse- 
stable ; then to take a bill-hook and cut 
down the thistles and weeds from the fence- 
corners in the home mowing-lot and along 
the road towards the village ; to dig up the 
docks round the garden patch ; to weed out 
the beet-bed ; to hoe the early potatoes ; to 
rake the sticks and leaves out of the front 
yard ; in short, there is work enough laid 
out for John to keep him busy, it seems to 
him, till he comes of age ; and at half an 
hour to sundown he is to go for the cows, 
and, mind he don't run 'em ! 

"Yes, sir," says John, "is that all ? " 

"Well, if you get through in good sea- 
son, you might pick over those potatoes in 
the cellar : they are sprouting ; they ain't 
fit to eat." 

John is obliged to his father, for if there 
is any sort of chore more cheerful to a boy 
than another, on a pleasant day, it is rub- 
bing the sprouts off potatoes in a dark 
cellar. And the old gentleman mounts his 

9 



BEING A BOY 

wagon and drives away down the enticing 
road, with the dog bounding along beside 
the wagon, and refusing to come back at 
John's call. John half wishes he were the 
dog. The dog knows the part of farming 
that suits him. He likes to run along the 
road and see all the dogs and other people, 
and he likes best of all to lie on the store 
steps at the Corners — while his master's 
horse is dozing at the post and his master 
is talking politics in the store — with the 
other dogs of his acquaintance, snapping 
at mutually annoying flies and indulging 
in that delightful dog gossip which is ex- 
pressed by a wag of the tail and a sniff of 
the nose. Nobody knows how many dogs' 
characters are destroyed in this gossip ; or 
how a dog may be able to insinuate suspicion 
by a wag of the tail as a man can by a shrug 
of the shoulders, or sniff a slander as a 
man can suggest one by raising his eye- 
brows. 

John looks after the old gentleman driv- 
ing off in state, with the odorous buffalo- 
robe and the new whip, and he thinks that 
is the sort of farming he would like to 

10 




IN THE CATTLE PASTURE 



THE BOY AS A FARMER 

do. And he cries after his departing par- 
ent, — 

" Say, father, can't I go over to the farther 
pasture and salt the cattle ? " John knows 
that he could spend half a day very pleas- 
antly in going over to that pasture, looking 
for bird's-nests and shying at red squirrels 
on the way, and who knows but he might 
"see" a sucker in the meadow brook, and 
perhaps get a "jab" at him with a sharp 
stick. He knows a hole where there is a 
whopper ; and one of his plans in life is to 
go some day and snare him, and bring him 
home in triumph. It therefore is strongly 
impressed upon his mind that the cattle 
want salting. But his father, without turn- 
ing his head, replies, — 

" No, they don't need salting any more 'n 
you do ! " And the old equipage goes rat- 
tling down the road, and John whistles his 
disappointment. When I was a boy on a 
farm, and I suppose it is so now, cattle were 
never salted half enough. 

John goes to his chores, and gets through 
the stable as soon as he can, for that must 
be done; but when it comes to the out- 

ii 



BEING A BOY 

door work, that rather drags. There are 
so many things to distract the attention, — 
a chipmunk in the fence, a bird on a near 
tree, and a hen-hawk circling high in the air 
over the barn-yard. John loses a little time 
in stoning the chipmunk, which rather likes 
the sport, and in watching the bird to find 
where its nest is ; and he convinces him- 
self that he ought to watch the hawk, lest 
it pounce upon the chickens, and, there- 
fore, with an easy conscience, he spends fif- 
teen minutes in hallooing to that distant 
bird, and follows it away out of sight over 
the woods, and then wishes it would come 
back again. And then a carriage with 
two horses, and a trunk on behind, goes 
along the road ; and there is a girl in the 
carriage who looks out at John, who is sud- 
denly aware that his trousers are patched 
on each knee and in two places behind ; 
and he wonders if she is rich, and whose 
name is on the trunk, and how much the 
horses cost, and whether that nice-looking 
man is the girl's father, and if that boy on 
the seat with the driver is her brother, and 
if he has to do chores ; and as the gay sight 

12 



THE BOY AS A FARMER 

disappears John falls to thinking about the 
great world beyond the farm, of cities, and 
people who are always dressed up, and a 
great many other things of which he has a 
very dim notion. And then a boy, whom 
John knows, rides by in a wagon with his 
father, and the boy makes a face at John, 
and John returns the greeting with a twist 
of his own visage and some symbolic ges- 
tures. All these things take time. The 
work of cutting down the big weeds gets on 
slowly, although it is not very disagreeable, 
or would not be if it were play. John im- 
agines that yonder big thistle is some whis- 
kered villain, of whom he has read in a fairy 
book, and he advances on him with " Die, 
ruffian ! " and slashes off his head with the 
bill-hook ; or he charges upon the rows of 
mullein-stalks as if they were rebels in regi- 
mental ranks, and hews them down without 
mercy. What fun it might be if there were 
only another boy there to help. But even 
war, single-handed, gets to be tiresome. 
It is dinner-time before John finishes the 
weeds, and it is cow-time before John has 
made much impression on the garden. 

13 



BEING A BOY 

This garden John has no fondness for. 
He would rather hoe corn all day than work 
in it. Father seems to think that it is easy 
work that John can do, because it is near 
the house ! John's continual plan in this 
life is to go fishing. When there comes a 
rainy day, he attempts to carry it out. But 
ten chances to one his father has different 
views. As it rains so that work cannot be 
done outdoors, it is a good time to work in 
the garden. He can run into the house 
during the heavy showers. John accord- 
ingly detests the garden ; and the only 
time he works briskly in it is when he has a 
stent set, to do so much weeding before the 
Fourth of July. If he is spry he can make 
an extra holiday the Fourth and the day 
after. Two days of gunpowder and ball- 
playing ! When I was a boy, I supposed 
there was some connection between such 
and such an amount of work done on the 
farm and our national freedom. I doubted 
if there could be any Fourth of July if my 
stent was not done. I, at least, worked for 
my Independence. 

14 



Ill 

THE DELIGHTS OF FARMING 

There are so many bright spots in the 
life of a farm-boy, that I sometimes think 
I should like to live the life over again ; 
I should almost be willing to be a girl if it 
were not for the chores. There is a great 
comfort to a boy in the amount of work 
he can get rid of doing. It is sometimes 
astonishing how slow he can go on an 
errand, he who leads the school in a race. 
The world is new and interesting to him, 
and there is so much to take his attention 
off, when he is sent to do anything. Per- 
haps he couldn't explain, himself, why, 
when he is sent to the neighbor's after 
yeast, he stops to stone the frogs ; he is 
not exactly cruel, but he wants to see if he 
can hit 'em. No other living thing can go 
so slow as a boy sent on an errand. His 
legs seem to be lead, unless he happens to 

IS 



BEING A BOY 

espy a woodchuck in an adjoining lot, when 
he gives chase to it like a deer ; and it is 
a curious fact about boys, that two will be 
a great deal slower in doing anything than 
one, and that the more you have to help on 
a piece of work the less is accomplished. 
Boys have a great power of helping each 
other to do nothing ; and they are so inno- 
cent about it, and unconscious. "I went 
as quick as ever I could," says the boy : 
his father asks him why he did n't stay all 
night, when he has been absent three hours 
on a ten-minute errand. The sarcasm has 
no effect on the boy. 

Going after the cows was a serious thing 
in my day. I had to climb a hill, which was 
covered with wild strawberries in the sea- 
son. Could any boy pass by those ripe ber- 
ries ? And then in the fragrant hill pasture 
there were beds of wintergreen with red 
berries, tufts of columbine, roots of sassa- 
fras to be dug, and dozens of things good 
to eat or to smell, that I could not resist. 
It sometimes even lay in my way to climb 
a tree to look for a crow's nest, or to swing 
in the top, and to try if I could see the 

16 




AFTER A CROW'S NEST 



THE DELIGHTS OF FARMING 

steeple of the village church. It became 
very important sometimes for me to see 
that steeple ; and in the midst of my inves- 
tigations the tin horn would blow a great 
blast from the farmhouse, which would 
send a cold chill down my back in the hot- 
test days. I knew what it meant. It had 
a frightfully impatient quaver in it, not at 
all like the sweet note that called us to din- 
ner from the hayneld. It said, "Why on 
earth does n't that boy come home ? It is 
almost dark, and the cows ain't milked ! " 
And that was the time the cows had to 
start into a brisk pace and make up for 
lost time. I wonder if any boy ever drove 
the cows home late, who did not say that 
the cows were at the very farther end of the 
pasture, and that " Old Brindle " was hidden 
in the woods, and he could n't find her for 
ever so long ! The brindle cow is the boy's 
scapegoat, many a time. 

No other boy knows how to appreciate a 
holiday as the farm-boy does ; and his best 
ones are of a peculiar kind. Going fishing 
is of course one sort. The excitement of 
rigging up the tackle, digging the bait, and 

17 



BEING A BOY 

the anticipation of great luck, — these are 
pure pleasures, enjoyed because they are 
rare. Boys who can go a-fishing any time 
care but little for it. Tramping all day 
through bush and brier, fighting flies and 
mosquitoes, and branches that tangle the 
line, and snags that break the hook, and re- 
turning home late and hungry, with wet feet 
and a string of speckled trout on a willow 
twig, and having the family crowd out at 
the kitchen door to look at 'em, and say, 
" Pretty well done for you, bub ; did you 
catch that big one yourself ? " — this is also 
pure happiness, the like of which the boy 
will never have again, not if he comes to be 
selectman and deacon and to "keep store." 
But the holidays I recall with delight 
were the two days in spring and fall, when 
we went to the distant pasture-land, in a 
neighboring town, may be, to drive thither 
the young cattle and colts, and to bring 
them back again. It was a wild and rocky 
upland where our great pasture was, many 
miles from home, the road to it running by 
a brawling river, and up a dashing brook- 
side among great hills. What a day's ad- 



THE DELIGHTS OF FARMING 

venture it was ! It was like a journey to 
Europe. The night before, I could scarcely 
sleep for thinking of it, and there was no 
trouble about getting me up at sunrise that 
morning. The breakfast was eaten, the 
luncheon was packed in a large basket, with 
bottles of root beer and a jug of switchel, 
which packing I superintended with the 
greatest interest ; and then the cattle were 
to be collected for the march, and the 
horses hitched up. Did I shirk any duty ? 
Was I slow? I think not. I was willing 
to run my legs off after the frisky steers, 
who seemed to have an idea they were go- 
ing on a lark, and frolicked about, dashing 
into all gates, and through all bars except 
the right ones ; and how cheerfully I did 
yell at them ; it was a glorious chance to 
"holler," and I have never since heard any 
public speaker on the stump or at camp- 
meeting who could make more noise. I 
have often thought it fortunate that the 
amount of noise in a boy does not increase 
in proportion to his size ; if it did the world 
could not contain it. 

The whole day was full of excitement 
19 



BEING A BOY 

and of freedom. We were away from the 
farm, which to a boy is one of the best 
parts of farming ; we saw other farms and 
other people at work ; I had the pleasure 
of marching along, and swinging my whip, 
past boys whom I knew, who were picking 
up stones. Every turn of the road, every 
bend and rapid of the river, the great 
boulders by the wayside, the watering- 
troughs, the giant pine that had been 
struck by lightning, the mysterious covered 
bridge over the river where it was most 
swift and rocky and foamy, the chance eagle 
in the blue sky, the sense of going some- 
where, - — why, as I recall all these things 
I feel that even the Prince Imperial, as he 
used to dash on horseback through the 
Bois de Boulogne, with fifty mounted hus- 
sars clattering at his heels, and crowds of 
people cheering, could not have been as 
happy as was I, a boy in short jacket and 
shorter pantaloons, trudging in the dust 
that day behind the steers and colts, crack- 
ing my black-stock whip. 

I wish the journey would never end ; but 
at last, by noon, we reach the pastures and 

20 



THE DELIGHTS OF FARMING 

turn in the herd ; and, after making the tour 
of the lots to make sure there are no breaks 
in the fences, we take our luncheon from 
the wagon and eat it under the trees by the 
spring. This is the supreme moment of the 
day. This is the way to live ; this is like 
the Swiss Family Robinson, and all the rest 
of my delightful acquaintances in romance. 
Baked beans, rye-and-indian bread (moist, 
remember), doughnuts and cheese, pie, and 
root beer. What richness ! You may live 
to dine at Delmonico's, or, if those French- 
men do not eat each other up, at Philippe's, 
in the Rue Montorgueil in Paris, where the 
dear old Thackeray used to eat as good a 
dinner as anybody ; but you will get there 
neither doughnuts, nor pie, nor root beer, 
nor anything so good as that luncheon at 
noon in the old pasture, high among the 
Massachusetts hills ! Nor will you ever, 
if you live to be the oldest boy in the world, 
have any holiday equal to the one I have 
described. But I always regretted that I 
did not take along a fish-line, just to "throw 
in" the brook we passed. I know there 
were trout there. 

21 



IV 

NO FARMING WITHOUT A BOY 

Say what you will about the general use- 
fulness of boys, it is my impression that a 
farm without a boy would very soon come 
to grief. What the boy does is the life 
of the farm. He is the factotum, always 
in demand, always expected to do the 
thousand indispensable things that nobody 
else will do. Upon him fall all the odds 
and ends, the most difficult things. After 
everybody else is through, he has to finish 
up. His work is like a woman's, — perpet- 
ual waiting on others. Everybody knows 
how much easier it is to eat a good dinner 
than it is to wash the dishes afterwards. 
Consider what a boy on a farm is required 
to do ; things that must be done, or life 
would actually stop. 

It is understood, in the first place, that 
he is to do all the errands, to go to the 

22 



NO FARMING WITHOUT A BOY 

store, to the post-office, and to carry all 
sorts of messages. If he had as many legs 
as a centipede, they would tire before night. 
His two short limbs seem to him entirely 
inadequate to the task. He would like to 
have as many legs as a wheel has spokes, 
and rotate about in the same way. This 
he sometimes tries to do ; and people who 
have seen him "turning cart-wheels" along 
the side of the road have supposed that he 
was amusing himself, and idling his time; 
he was only trying to invent a new mode of 
locomotion, so that he could economize his 
legs and do his errands with greater dis- 
patch. He practices standing on his head, 
in order to accustom himself to any posi- 
tion. Leap-frog is one of his methods of 
getting over the ground quickly. He would 
willingly go an errand any distance if he 
could leap-frog it with a few other boys. 
He has a natural genius for combining 
pleasure with business. This is the reason 
why, when he is sent to the spring for a 
pitcher of water, and the family are waiting 
at the dinner-table, he is absent so long ; 
for he stops to poke the frog that sits on 

23 



BEING A BOY 

the stone, or, if there is a penstock, to put 
his hand over the spout and squirt the 
water a little while. He is the one who 
spreads the grass when the men have cut 
it ; he mows it away in the barn ; he rides 
the horse to cultivate the corn, up and 
down the hot, weary rows ; he picks up the 
potatoes when they are dug ; he drives the 
cows night and morning ; he brings wood 
and water and splits kindling ; he gets up 
the horse and puts out the horse ; whether 
he is in the house or out of it, there is al- 
ways something for him to do. Just before 
school in winter he shovels paths ; in sum- 
mer he turns the grindstone. He knows 
where there are lots of wintergreen and 
sweet flag root, but instead of going for 
them he is to stay indoors and pare apples 
and stone raisins and pound something in 
a mortar. And yet, with his mind full of 
schemes of what he would like to do, and 
his hands full of occupations, he is an idle 
boy who has nothing to busy himself with 
but school and chores ! He would gladly 
do all the work if somebody else would do 
the chores, he thinks, and yet I doubt if 

24 



NO FARMING WITHOUT A BOY 

any boy ever amounted to anything in the 
world, or was of much use as a man, who 
did not enjoy the advantages of a liberal 
education in the way of chores. 

A boy on a farm is nothing without his 
pets ; at least a dog, and probably rabbits, 
chickens, ducks, and guinea hens. A guinea 
hen suits a boy. It is entirely useless, and 
makes a more disagreeable noise than a 
Chinese gong. I once domesticated a young 
fox which a neighbor had caught. It is a 
mistake to suppose the fox cannot be tamed. 
Jacko was a very clever little animal, and 
behaved, in all respects, with propriety. He 
kept Sunday as well as any day, and all the 
ten commandments that he could under- 
stand. He was a very graceful playfellow, 
and seemed to have an affection for me. 
He lived in a woodpile, in the dooryard, 
and when I lay down at the entrance to 
his house and called him, he would come 
out and sit on his tail and lick my face just 
like a grown person. I taught him a great 
many tricks and all the virtues. That year 
I had a large number of hens, and Jacko 
went about among them with the most per- 

25 



BEING A BOY 

feet indifference, never looking on them to 
lust after them, as I could see, and never 
touching an egg or a feather. So excellent 
was his reputation that I would have trusted 
him in the hen-roost in the dark without 
counting the hens. In short, he was do- 
mesticated, and I was fond of him and very- 
proud of him, exhibiting him to all our vis- 
itors as an example of what affectionate 
treatment would do in subduing the brute 
instincts. I preferred him to my dog, 
whom I had, with much patience, taught to 
go up a long hill alone and surround the 
cows, and drive them home from the re- 
mote pasture. He liked the fun of it at 
first, but by and by he seemed to get the 
notion that it was a " chore," and when I 
whistled for him to go for the cows, he 
would turn tail and run the other way, and 
the more I whistled and threw stones at 
him the faster he would run. His name 
was Turk, and I should have sold him if he 
had not been the kind of dog that nobody 
will buy. I suppose he was not a cow-dog, 
but what they call a sheep-dog. At least, 
when he got big enough, he used to get 

26 



NO FARMING WITHOUT A BOY 

into the pasture and chase the sheep to 
death. That was the way he got into trou- 
ble, and lost his valuable life. A dog is of 
great use on a farm, and that is the reason 
a boy likes him. He is good to bite ped- 
lers and small children, and run out and 
yelp at wagons that pass by, and to howl 
all night when the moon shines. And yet, 
if I were a boy again, the first thing I 
would have should be a dog ; for dogs are 
great companions, and as active and spry 
as a boy at doing nothing. They are also 
good to bark at woodchuck holes. 

A good dog will bark at a woodchuck 
hole long after the animal has retired to a 
remote part of his residence, and escaped 
by another hole. This deceives the wood- 
chuck. Some of the most delightful hours 
of my life have been spent in hiding and 
watching the hole where the dog was not. 
What an exquisite thrill ran through my 
frame when the timid nose appeared, was 
withdrawn, poked out again, and finally fol- 
lowed by the entire animal, who looked cau- 
tiously about, and then hopped away to feed 
on the clover. At that moment I rushed 

27 



BEING A BOY 

in, occupied the " home base," yelled to 
Turk and then danced with delight at the 
combat between the spunky woodchuck and 
the dog. They were about the same size, 
but science and civilization won the day. I 
did not reflect then that it would have been 
more in the interest of civilization if the 
woodchuck had killed the dog. I do not 
know why it is that boys so like to hunt 
and kill animals ; but the excuse that I 
gave in this case for the murder was, that 
the woodchuck ate the clover and trod it 
down ; and, in fact, was a woodchuck. It 
was not till long after that I learned with 
surprise that he is a rodent mammal, of the 
species Arctomys monax, is called at the 
West a ground-hog, and is eaten by peo- 
ple of color with great relish. 

But I have forgotten my beautiful fox. 
Jacko continued to deport himself well until 
the young chickens came ; he was actually 
cured of the fox vice of chicken-stealing. 
He used to go with me about the coops, 
pricking up his ears in an intelligent man- 
ner, and with a demure eye and the most 
virtuous droop of the tail. Charming fox ! 

28 




WATCHING FOR SUNSET 



NO FARMING WITHOUT A BOY 

If he had held out a little while longer, I 
should have put him into a Sunday-school 
book. But I began to miss chickens. They 
disappeared mysteriously in the night. I 
would not suspect Jacko at first, for he 
looked so honest, and in the daytime he 
seemed to be as much interested in the 
chickens as I was. But one morning, when 
I went to call him, I found feathers at the 
entrance of his hole, — chicken feathers. 
He couldn't deny it. He was a thief. 
His fox nature had come out under severe 
temptation. And he died an unnatural 
death. He had a thousand virtues and one 
crime. But that crime struck at the foun- 
dation of society. He deceived and stole ; 
he was a liar and a thief, and no pretty 
ways could hide the fact. His intelligent, 
bright face could n't save him. If he had 
been honest, he might have grown up to be 
a large, ornamental fox. 

29 



V 

THE BOY'S SUNDAY 

Sunday in the New England hill towns 
used to begin Saturday night at sundown ; 
and the sun is lost to sight behind the hills 
there before it has set by the almanac. I 
remember that we used to go by the alma- 
nac Saturday night and by the visible dis- 
appearance Sunday night. On Saturday 
night we very slowly yielded to the influ- 
ences of the holy time, which were settling 
down upon us, and submitted to the ablu- 
tions which were as inevitable as Sunday ; 
but when the sun (and it never moved so 
slow) slid behind the hills Sunday night, 
the effect upon the watching boy was like a 
shock from a galvanic battery ; something 
flashed through all his limbs and set them 
in motion, and no " play " ever seemed so 
sweet to him as that between sundown 
and dark Sunday night. This, however, 

30 



THE BOY'S SUNDAY 

was on the supposition that he had con- 
scientiously kept Sunday, and had not gone 
in swimming and got drowned. This keep- 
ing of Saturday night instead of Sunday 
night we did not very well understand; 
but it seemed, on the whole, a good thing 
that we should rest Saturday night when 
we were tired, and play Sunday night when 
we were rested. I supposed, however, that 
it was an arrangement made to suit the 
big boys who wanted to go " courting" Sun- 
day night. Certainly they were not to 
be blamed, for Sunday was the day when 
pretty girls were most fascinating, and I 
have never since seen any so lovely as those 
who used to sit in the gallery and in the 
singers' seats in the bare old meeting- 
houses. 

Sunday to the country farmer-boy was 
hardly the relief that it was to the other 
members of the family; for the same 
chores must be done that day as on others, 
and he could not divert his mind with whis- 
tling, hand-springs, or sending the dog into 
the river after sticks. He had to submit, 
in the first place, to the restraint of shoes 

31 



BEING A BOY 

and stockings. He read in the Old Testa- 
ment that when Moses came to holy ground 
he put off his shoes ; but the boy was 
obliged to put his on, upon the holy day, 
not only to go to meeting, but while he sat 
at home. Only the emancipated country- 
boy, who is as agile on his bare feet as a 
young kid, and rejoices in the pressure of 
the warm soft earth, knows what a hard- 
ship it is to tie on stiff shoes. The monks 
who put peas in their shoes as a penance 
do not suffer more than the country-boy in 
his penitential Sunday shoes. I recall the 
celerity with which he used to kick them off 
at sundown. 

Sunday morning was not an idle one for 
the farmer-boy. He must rise tolerably 
early, for the cows were to be milked and 
driven to pasture; family prayers were a 
little longer than on other days ; there were 
the Sunday-school verses to be re-learned, 
for they did not stay in mind over night ; 
perhaps the wagon was to be greased before 
the neighbors began to drive by; and the 
horse was to be caught out of the pasture, 
ridden home bareback, and harnessed. 

32 



THE BOY'S SUNDAY 

This catching the horse, perhaps two of 
them, was very good fun usually, and would 
have broken the Sunday if the horse had 
not been wanted for taking the family to 
meeting. It was so peaceful and still in the 
pasture on Sunday morning ; but the horses 
were never so playful, the colts never so 
frisky. Round and round the lot the boy 
went, calling, in an entreating Sunday 
voice, "Jock, jock, jock, jock," and shaking 
his salt-dish, while the horses, with heads 
erect, and shaking tails and flashing heels, 
dashed from corner to corner, and gave the 
boy a pretty good race before he could coax 
the nose of one of them into his dish. The 
boy got angry, and came very near saying 
"dum it," but he rather enjoyed the fun, 
after all 

The boy remembers how his mother's 
anxiety was divided between the set of his 
turn-over collar, the parting of his hair, and 
his memory of the Sunday-school verses ; 
and what a wild confusion there was 
through the house in getting off for meet- 
ing, and how he was kept running hither 
and thither, to get the hymn-book, or a 

33 



BEING A BOY 

palm-leaf fan, or the best whip, or to pick 
from the Sunday part of the garden the 
bunch of caraway seed. Already the dea- 
con's mare, with a wagon load of the dea- 
con's folks, had gone shambling past, head 
and tail drooping, clumsy hoofs kicking up 
clouds of dust, while the good deacon sat 
jerking the reins in an automatic way, and 
the "women-folks" patiently saw the dust 
settle upon their best summer finery. 
Wagon after wagon went along the sandy 
road, and when our boy's family started, 
they became part of a long procession, 
which sent up a mile of dust and a pun- 
gent if not pious smell of buffalo - robes. 
There were fiery horses in the train which 
had to be held in, for it was neither eti- 
quette nor decent to pass anybody on Sun- 
day. It was a great delight to the farmer- 
boy to see all this procession of horses, and 
to exchange sly winks with the other boys, 
who leaned over the wagon-seats for that 
purpose. Occasionally a boy rode behind, 
with his back to the family, and his panto- 
mime was always something wonderful to see, 
and was considered very daring and wicked. 

34 



THE BOY'S SUNDAY . 

The meeting-house which our boy re- 
members was a high, square building, with- 
out a steeple. Within, it had a lofty pul- 
pit, with doors underneath and closets 
where sacred things were kept, and where 
the tithing-men were supposed to imprison 
bad boys. The pews were square, with 
seats facing each other, those on one side 
low for the children, and all with hinges, so 
that they could be raised when the congre- 
gation stood up for prayers and leaned over 
the backs of the pews, as horses meet each 
other across a pasture fence. After prayers 
these seats used to be slammed down with 
a long-continued clatter, which seemed to 
the boys about the best part of the exer- 
cises. The galleries were very high, and 
the singers' seats, where the pretty girls 
sat, were the most conspicuous of all. To 
sit in the gallery, away from the family, was 
a privilege not often granted to the boy. 
The tithing-man, who carried a long rod 
and kept order in the house, and outdoors 
at noontime, sat in the gallery, and visited 
any boy who whispered or found curious 
passages in the Bible and showed them 

35 



BEING A BOY 

to another boy. It was an awful moment 
when the bushy-headed tithing-man ap- 
proached a boy in sermon-time. The eyes 
of the whole congregation were on him, 
and he could feel the guilt ooze out of his 
burning face. 

At noon was Sunday-school, and after 
that, before the afternoon service, in sum- 
mer, the boys had a little time to eat their 
luncheon together at the watering-trough, 
where some of the elders were likely to be 
gathered, talking very solemnly about cattle ; 
or they went over to a neighboring barn 
to see the calves ; or they slipped off down 
the roadside to a place where they could 
dig sassafras or the root of the sweet flag, 
■ — roots very fragrant in the mind of many 
a boy with religious associations to this day. 
There was often an odor of sassafras in the 
afternoon service. It used to stand in my 
mind as a substitute for the Old Testament 
incense of the Jews. Something in the 
same way the big bass - viol in the choir 
took the place of " David's harp of solemn 
sound." 

The going home from meeting was more 
36 




TURNING THE GRINDSTONE 



THE BOY'S SUNDAY 

cheerful and lively than the coming to it. 
There was all the bustle of getting the 
horses out of the sheds and bringing them 
round to the meeting-house steps. At noon 
the boys sometimes sat in the wagons and 
swung the whips without cracking them : 
now it was permitted to give them a little 
snap in order to bring the horses up in good 
style ; and the boy was rather proud of the 
horse if it pranced a little while the timid 
" women-folks " were trying to get in. The 
boy had an eye for whatever life and stir 
there was in a New England Sunday. He 
liked to drive home fast. The old house 
and the farm looked pleasant to him. 
There was an extra dinner when they 
reached home, and a cheerful conscious- 
ness of duty performed made it a pleasant 
dinner. Long before sundown the Sunday- 
school book had been read, and the boy sat 
waiting in the house with great impatience 
the signal that the " day of rest " was over. 
A boy may not be very wicked, and yet not 
see the need of "rest." Neither his idea of 
rest nor work is that of older farmers. 

37 



VI 

THE GRINDSTONE OF LIFE 

If there is one thing more than another 
that hardens the lot of the farmer-boy it 
is the grindstone. Turning grindstones to 
grind scythes is one of those heroic but un- 
obtrusive occupations for which one gets no 
credit. It is a hopeless kind of task, and, 
however faithfully the crank is turned, it is 
one that brings little reputation. There is a 
great deal of poetry about haying — I mean 
for those not engaged in it. One likes to 
hear the whetting of the scythes on a fresh 
morning and the response of the noisy 
bobolink, who always sits upon the fence 
and superintends the cutting of the dew- 
laden grass. There is a sort of music in 
the " swish " and a rhythm in the swing of 
the scythes in concert. The boy has not 
much time to attend to it, for it is lively 
business "spreading" after half a dozen 

38 



THE GRINDSTONE OF LIFE 

men who have only to walk along and lay 
the grass low, while the boy has the whole 
hayfield on his hands. He has little time 
for the poetry of haying, as he struggles 
along, filling the air with the wet mass 
which he shakes over his head, and picking 
his way with short legs and bare feet amid 
the short and freshly cut stubble. 

But if the scythes cut well and swing 
merrily it is due to the boy who turned the 
grindstone. Oh, it was nothing to do, just 
turn the grindstone a few minutes for this 
and that one before breakfast ; any " hired 
man " was authorized to order the boy to 
turn the grindstone. How they did bear on, 
those great strapping fellows ! Turn, turn, 
turn, what a weary go it was. For my 
part, I used to like a grindstone that " wab- 
bled " a good deal on its axis, for when I 
turned it fast, it put the grinder on a lively 
lookout for cutting his hands, and entirely 
satisfied his desire that I should "turn 
faster." It was some sport to make the water 
fly and wet the grinder, suddenly starting 
up quickly and surprising him when I was 
turning very slowly. I used to wish some- 

39 



BEING A BOY 

times that I could turn fast enough to make 
the stone fly into a dozen pieces. Steady 
turning is what the grinders like, and any 
boy who turns steadily, so as to give an 
even motion to the stone, will be much 
praised, and will be in demand. I advise 
any boy who desires to do this sort of work 
to turn steadily. If he does it by jerks and 
in a fitful manner, the " hired men " will be 
very apt to dispense with his services and 
turn the grindstone for each other. 

This is one of the most disagreeable tasks 
of the boy farmer, and, hard as it is, I do 
not know why it is supposed to belong es- 
pecially to childhood. But it is, and one 
of the certain marks that second childhood 
has come to a man on a farm is that he is 
asked to turn the grindstone as if he were 
a boy again. When the old man is good for 
nothing else, when he can neither mow nor 
pitch, and scarcely " rake after," he can 
turn grindstone, and it is in this way that 
he renews his youth. " Ain't you ashamed 
to have your granther turn the grind- 
stone ? " asks the hired man of the boy. So 
the boy takes hold and turns himself, till 

40 



THE GRINDSTONE OF LIFE 

his little back aches. When he gets older 
he wishes he had replied, " Ain't you 
ashamed to make either an old man or a 
little boy do such hard grinding work ? " 

Doing the regular work of this world is 
not much, the boy thinks, but the wearisome 
part is the waiting on the people who do 
the work. And the boy is not far wrong. 
This is what women and boys have to do 
on a farm, — wait upon everybody who 
"works." The trouble with the boy's life 
is that he has no time that he can call his 
own. He is, like a barrel of beer, always on 
draught. The men-folks, having worked in 
the regular hours, lie down and rest, stretch 
themselves idly in the shade at noon, or 
lounge about after supper. Then the boy, 
who has done nothing all day but turn 
grindstone, and spread hay, and rake after, 
and run his little legs off at everybody's 
beck and call, is sent on some errand or 
some household chore, in order that time 
shall not hang heavy on his hands. The 
boy comes nearer to perpetual motion than 
anything else in nature, only it is not alto- 
gether a voluntary motion. The time that 

41 



BEING A BOY 

the farm-boy gets for his own is usually at 
the end of a stent. We used to be given 
a certain piece of corn to hoe, or a certain 
quantity of corn to husk in so many days. 
If we finished the task before the time set, 
we had the remainder to ourselves. In my 
day it used to take very sharp work to gain 
anything, but we were always anxious to 
take the chance. I think we enjoyed the 
holiday in anticipation quite as much as we 
did when we had won it. Unless it was 
training-day, or Fourth of July, or the cir- 
cus was coming, it was a little difficult to 
find anything big enough to fill our antici- 
pations of the fun we would have in the 
day or the two or three days we had earned. 
We did not want to waste the time on any 
common thing. Even going fishing in one 
of the wild mountain brooks was hardly up 
to the mark, for we could sometimes do 
that on a rainy day. Going down to the 
village store was not very exciting, and 
was on the whole a waste of our precious 
time. Unless we could get out our mili- 
tary company, life was apt to be a little 
blank, even on the holidays for which we 

42 



THE GRINDSTONE OF LIFE 

had worked so hard. If you went to see 
another boy, he was probably at work in 
the hayfield or the potato-patch, and his 
father looked at you askance. You some- 
times took hold and helped him, so that 
he could go and play with you ; but it was 
usually time to go for the cows before the 
task was done. There has been a change, 
but the amusements of a boy in the coun- 
try were few then. Snaring "suckers " out 
of the deep meadow brook used to be about 
as good as any that I had. The North 
American sucker is not an engaging animal 
in all respects ; his body is comely enough, 
but his mouth is puckered up like that of a 
purse. The mouth is not formed for the 
gentle angle-worm nor the delusive fly of 
the fishermen. It is necessary therefore to 
snare the fish if you want him. In the 
sunny days he lies in the deep pools, by 
some big stone or near the bank, poising 
himself quite still, or only stirring his fins 
a little now and then, as an elephant moves 
his ears. He will lie so for hours, — or 
rather float, — in perfect idleness and ap- 
parent bliss. 

43 



BEING A BOY 

The boy who also has a holiday, but can- 
not keep still, comes along and peeps over 
the bank. " Golly, ain't he a big one ! " Per- 
haps he is eighteen inches long, and weighs 
two or three pounds. He lies there among 
his friends, little fish and big ones, quite a 
school of them, perhaps a district school, 
that only keeps in warm days in the summer. 
The pupils seem to have little to learn, ex- 
cept to balance themselves and to turn 
gracefully with a flirt of the tail. Not much 
is taught but " deportment," and some of 
the old suckers are perfect Turveydrops in 
that. The boy is armed with a pole and a 
stout line, and on the end of it a brass wire 
bent into a hoop, which is a slipnoose, and 
slides together when anything is caught in 
it. The boy approaches the bank and looks 
over. There he lies, calm as a whale. 
The boy devours him with his eyes. He is 
almost too much excited to drop the snare 
into the water without making a noise. A 
puff of wind comes and ruffles the surface, 
so that he cannot see the fish. It is calm 
again, and there he still is, moving his fins 
in peaceful security. The boy lowers his 

44 



THE GRINDSTONE OF LIFE 

snare behind the fish and slips it along. 
He intends to get it around him just back 
of the gills and then elevate him with a 
sudden jerk. It is a delicate operation, 
for the snare will turn a little, and if it 
hits the fish he is off. However, it goes 
well, the wire is almost in place, when sud- 
denly the fish, as if he had a warning in a 
dream, for he appears to see nothing, moves 
his tail just a little, glides out of the loop, 
and, with no seeming appearance of frus- 
trating any one's plans, lounges over to the 
other side of the pool ; and there he re- 
poses just as if he was not spoiling the 
boy's holiday. 

This slight change of base on the part of 
the fish requires the boy to reorganize his 
whole campaign, get a new position on the 
bank, a new line of approach, and patiently 
wait for the wind and sun before he can 
lower his line. This time, cunning and pa- 
tience are rewarded. The hoop encircles 
the unsuspecting fish. The boy's eyes 
almost start from his head as he gives a tre- 
mendous jerk, and feels by the dead-weight 
that he has got him fast. Out he comes, 

45 



BEING A BOY 

up he goes in the air, and the boy runs to 

look at him. In this transaction, however, 

no one can be more surprised than the 

sucker. 

46 



VII 

FICTION AND SENTIMENT 

The boy farmer does not appreciate 
school vacations as highly as his city cousin. 
When school keeps he has only to "do 
chores and go to school," — but between 
terms there are a thousand things on the 
farm that have been left for the boy to do. 
Picking up stones in the pastures and piling 
them in heaps used to be one of them. 
Some lots appeared to grow stones, or else 
the sun every year drew them to the sur- 
face, as it coaxes the round cantelopes out 
of the soft garden soil ; it is certain that 
there were fields that always gave the boys 
this sort of fall work. And very lively 
work it was on frosty mornings for the 
barefooted boys, who were continually turn- 
ing up the larger stones in order to stand 
for a moment in the warm place that had 
been covered from the frost. A boy can 

47 



BEING A BOY 

stand on one leg as well as a Holland stork; 
and the boy who found a warm spot for the 
sole of his foot was likely to stand in it 
until the words, " Come, stir your stumps," 
broke in discordantly upon his meditations. 
For the boy is very much given to medita- 
tions. If he had his way he would do no- 
thing in a hurry ; he likes to stop and think 
about things, and enjoy his work as he goes 
along. He picks up potatoes as if each one 
was a lump of gold just turned out of the 
dirt, and requiring careful examination. 

Although the country boy feels a little 
joy when school breaks up (as he does 
when anything breaks up, or any change 
takes place), since he is released from the 
discipline and restraint of it, yet the school 
is his opening into the world, — his ro- 
mance. Its opportunities for enjoyment are 
numberless. He does not exactly know 
what he is set at books for ; he takes spell- 
ing rather as an exercise for his lungs, 
standing up and shouting out the words 
with entire recklessness of consequences ; 
he grapples doggedly with arithmetic and 
geography as something that must be 

48 





^^^M^y 1 ; ! 


, ,.,-::€ 


jy 




'"'sSL- 


iii . 


v^^m 


■•■'.: ..;:-.;.^m-. . . - ■■■*.;■ 



FICTION AND SENTIMENT 

cleared out of his way before recess, but 
not at all with the zest he would dig a 
woodchuck out of his hole. But recess ! 
Was ever any enjoyment so keen as that 
with which a boy rushes out of the school- 
house door for the ten minutes of recess ? 
He is like to burst with animal spirits ; he 
runs like a deer ; he can nearly fly ; and 
he throws himself into play with entire self- 
forgetfulness, and an energy that would 
overturn the world if his strength were pro- 
portioned to it. For ten minutes the world 
is absolutely his ; the weights are taken 
off, restraints are loosed, and he is his own 
master for that brief time, — as he never 
again will be if he lives to be as old as the 
king of Thule, and nobody knows how old 
he was. And there is the nooning, a solid 
hour, in which vast projects can be carried 
out which have been slyly matured during 
the school-hours ; expeditions are under- 
taken, wars are begun between the Indians 
on one side and the settlers on the other, 
the military company is drilled (without 
uniforms or arms), or games are carried on 
which involve miles of running, and an 

49 



BEING A BOY 

expenditure of wind sufficient to spell the 
spelling-book through at the highest pitch. 

Friendships are formed, too, which are 
fervent if not enduring, and enmities con- 
tracted which are frequently "taken out" 
on the spot, after a rough fashion boys 
have of settling as they go along ; cases of 
long credit, either in words or trade, are 
not frequent with boys ; boot on jack-knives 
must be paid on the nail ; and it is consid- 
ered much more honorable to out with a 
personal grievance at once, even if the ex- 
planation is made with the fists, than to 
pretend fair, and then take a sneaking re- 
venge on some concealed opportunity. The 
country boy at the district school is intro- 
duced into a wider world than he knew at 
home, in many ways. Some big boy brings 
to school a copy of the Arabian Nights, a 
dog-eared copy, with cover, title-page, and 
the last leaves missing, which is passed 
around, and slyly read under the desk, and 
perhaps comes to the little boy whose par- 
ents disapprove of novel-reading, and have 
no work of fiction in the house except a 
pious fraud called " Six Months in a Con- 

5° 



FICTION AND SENTIMENT 

vent," and the latest comic almanac. The 
boy's eyes dilate as he steals some of the 
treasures out of the wondrous pages, and 
he longs to lose himself in the land of 
enchantment open before him. He tells 
at home that he has seen the most wonder- 
ful book that ever was, and a big boy has 
promised to lend it to him. " Is it a true 
book, John ? " asks the grandmother ; " be- 
cause if it is n't true, it is the worst thing 
that a boy can read." (This happened 
years ago.) John cannot answer as to the 
truth of the book, and so does not bring it 
home ; but he borrows it, nevertheless, and 
conceals it in the barn, and lying in the 
hay-mow is lost in its enchantments many 
an odd hour when he is supposed to be 
doing chores. There were no chores in 
the Arabian Nights ; the boy there had but 
to rub the ring and summon a genius, who 
would feed the calves and pick up chips 
and bring in wood in a minute. It was 
through this emblazoned portal that the 
boy walked into the world of books, which 
he soon found was larger than his own, and 
filled with people he longed to know. 

5i 



BEING A BOY 

And the farmer-boy is not without his 
sentiment and his secrets, though he has 
never been at a children's party in his life, 
and, in fact, never has heard that children 
go into society when they are seven, and 
give regular wine-parties when they reach 
the ripe age of nine. But one of his re- 
grets at having the summer school close is 
dimly connected with a little girl, whom he 
does not care much for, — would a great 
deal rather play with a boy than with her at 
recess, — but whom he will not see again 
for some time, — a sweet little thing, who 
is very friendly with John, and with whom 
he has been known to exchange bits of 
candy wrapped up in paper, and for whom 
he cut in two his lead-pencil, and gave her 
half. At the last day of school she goes 
part way with John, and then he turns and 
goes a longer distance towards her home, 
so that it is late when he reaches his own. 
Is he late? He didn't know he was late, 
he came straight home when school was 
dismissed, only going a little way home with 
Alice Linton to help her carry her books. 
In a box in his chamber, which he has lately 

52 



FICTION AND SENTIMENT 

put a padlock on, among fish-hooks and 
lines and bait-boxes, odd pieces of brass, 
twine, early sweet apples, popcorn, beech- 
nuts, and other articles of value, are some 
little billets-doux, fancifully folded, three- 
cornered or otherwise, and written, I will 
warrant, in red or beautifully blue ink. 
These little notes are parting gifts at the 
close of school, and John, no doubt, gave 
his own in exchange for them, though the 
writing was an immense labor, and the fold- 
ing was a secret bought of another boy 
for a big piece of sweet flag-root baked in 
sugar, a delicacy which. John used to carry 
in his pantaloons pocket until his pocket 
was in such a state that putting his fingers 
into them was about as good as dipping 
them into the sugar-bowl at home. Each 
precious note contained a lock or curl of 
girl's hair, — a rare collection of all colors, 
after John had been in school many terms, 
and had passed through a great many part- 
ing scenes, — blacky brown, red, tow-color, 
and some that looked like spun gold and 
felt like silk. The sentiment contained in 
the notes was that which was common in 

53 



BEING A BOY 

the school, and expressed a melancholy 
foreboding of early death, and a touching 
desire to leave hair enough this side the 
grave to constitute a sort of strand of 
remembrance. With little variation, the 
poetry that made the hair precious was in 
the words, and, as a Cockney would say, 
set to the hair, following : — 

" This lock of hair, 

Which I did wear, 
Was taken from my head ; 

When this you see, 

Remember me, 
Long after I am dead." 

John liked to read these verses, which 
always made a new and fresh impression 
with each lock of hair, and he was not 
critical ; they were for him vehicles of true 
sentiment, and indeed they were what he 
used when he inclosed a clip of his own 
sandy hair to a friend. And it did not 
occur to him until he was a great deal 
older and less innocent to smile at them. 
John felt that he would sacredly keep every 
lock of hair intrusted to him, though death 
should come on the wings of cholera and 

54 



FICTION AND SENTIMENT 

take away every one of these sad, red-ink 
correspondents. When John's big brother 
one day caught sight of these treasures, 
and brutally told him that he "had hair 
enough to stuff a horse-collar," John was 
so outraged and shocked, as he should have 
been, at this rude invasion of his heart, this 
coarse suggestion, this profanation of his 
most delicate feeling, that he was only kept 
from crying by the resolution to " lick " 
his brother as soon as ever he got big 
enough. 

55 



VIII 

THE COMING OF THANKSGIVING 

One of the best things in farming is 
gathering the chestnuts, hickory-nuts, but- 
ternuts, and even beech-nuts, in the late 
fall, after the frosts have cracked the husks 
and the high winds have shaken them, and 
the colored leaves have strewn the ground. 
On a bright October day, when the air is 
full of golden sunshine, there is nothing 
quite so exhilarating as going nutting. Nor 
is the pleasure of it altogether destroyed 
for the boy by the consideration that he is 
making himself useful in obtaining supplies 
for the winter household. The getting-in 
of potatoes and corn is a different thing; 
that is the prose, but nutting is the poetry, 
of farm life. I am not sure but the boy 
would find it very irksome, though, if he 
were obliged to work at nut-gathering in 
order to procure food for the family. He is 

56 



THE COMING OF THANKSGIVING 

willing to make himself useful in his own 
way. The Italian boy, who works day after 
day at a huge pile of pine-cones, pounding 
and cracking them and taking out the long 
seeds, which are sold and eaten as we eat 
nuts (and which are almost as good as 
pumpkin-seeds, another favorite with the 
Italians), probably does not see the fun of 
nutting. Indeed, if the farmer-boy here 
were set at pounding off the walnut-shucks 
and opening the prickly chestnut-burs as 
a task, he would think himself an ill-used 
boy. What a hardship the prickles in his 
fingers would be ! But now he digs them 
out with his jack-knife, and he enjoys the 
process, on the whole. The boy is willing 
to do any amount of work if it is called 
play. 

In nutting, the squirrel is not more nim- 
ble and industrious than the boy. I like to 
see a crowd of boys swarm over a chestnut- 
grove ; they leave a desert behind them 
like the seventeen-years locusts. To climb 
a tree and shake it, to club it, to strip it of 
its fruit and pass to the next, is the sport of 
a brief time. I have seen a legion of boys 

57 



BEING A BOY 

scamper over our grassplot under the chest- 
nut-trees, each one as active as if he were a 
new patent picking-machine, sweeping the 
ground clean of nuts, and disappear over 
the hill before I could go to the door and 
speak to them about it. Indeed, I have 
noticed that boys don't care much for con- 
versation with the owners of fruit-trees. 
They could speedily make their fortunes if 
they would work as rapidly in cotton-fields. 
I have never seen anything like it except a 
flock of turkeys removing the grasshoppers 
from a piece of pasture. 

Perhaps it is not generally known that we 
get the idea of some of our best military 
manoeuvres from the turkey. The deploy- 
ing of the skirmish-line in advance of an 
army is one of them. The drum-major of 
our holiday militia companies is copied ex- 
actly from the turkey gobbler ; he has the 
same splendid appearance, the same proud 
step, and the same martial aspect. The 
gobbler does not lead his forces in the field, 
but goes behind them, like the colonel of a 
regiment, so that he can see every part of 
the line and direct its movements. This 

58 



•■'■: ' ■■■"'■":■'■" ■: 




THE COMING OF THANKSGIVING 

resemblance is one of the most singular 
things in natural history. I like to watch 
the gobbler manoeuvring his forces in a 
grasshopper-field. He throws out his com- 
pany of two dozen turkeys in a crescent- 
shaped skirmish-line, the number disposed 
at equal distances, while he walks majesti- 
cally in the rear. They advance rapidly, 
picking right and left, with military pre- 
cision, killing the foe and disposing of the 
dead bodies with the same peck. Nobody 
has yet discovered how many grasshoppers 
a turkey will hold ; but he is very much 
like a boy at a Thanksgiving dinner, — he 
keeps on eating as long as the supplies 
last. 

The gobbler, in one of these raids, does 
not condescend to grab a single grasshop- 
per, — at least, not while anybody is watch- 
ing him. But I suppose he makes up for it 
when his dignity cannot be injured by hav- 
ing spectators of his voracity; perhaps he 
falls upon the grasshoppers when they are 
driven into a corner of the field. But he is 
only fattening himself for destruction ; like 
all greedy persons, he comes to a bad end. 

59 



BEING A BOY 

And if the turkeys had any Sunday-school, 
they would be taught this. 

The New England boy used to look for- 
ward to Thanksgiving as the great event of 
the year. He was apt to get stents set him, 
— so much corn to husk, for instance, be- 
fore that day, so that he could have an ex- 
tra play-spell ; and in order to gain a day 
or two, he would work at his task with 
the rapidity of half a dozen boys. He had 
the day after Thanksgiving always as a holi- 
day, and this was the day he counted on. 
Thanksgiving itself was rather an awful fes- 
tival, — very much like Sunday, except for 
the enormous dinner, which filled his imagi- 
nation for months before as completely as 
it did his stomach for that day and a week 
after. There was an impression in the 
house that that dinner was the most impor- 
tant event since the landing from the May- 
flower. Heliogabalus, who did not resem- 
ble a Pilgrim Father at all, but who had 
prepared for himself in his day some very 
sumptuous banquets in Rome, and ate a 
great deal of the best he could get (and 
liked peacocks stuffed with asafcetida, for 

60 



THE COMING OF THANKSGIVING 

one thing), never had anything like a 
Thanksgiving dinner; for do you suppose 
that he, or Sardanapalus either, ever had 
twenty -four different kinds of pie at one 
dinner ? Therein many a New England boy 
is greater than the Roman emperor or the 
Assyrian king, and these were among the 
most luxurious eaters of their day and gen- 
eration. But something more is necessary 
to make good men than plenty to eat, as 
Heliogabalus no doubt found when his head 
was cut off. Cutting off the head was a 
mode the people had of expressing disap- 
proval of their conspicuous men. Nowadays 
they elect them to a higher office, or give 
them a mission to some foreign country, if 
they do not do well where they are. 

For days and days before Thanksgiving 
the boy was kept at work evenings, pound- 
ing and paring and cutting up and mixing 
(not being allowed to taste much), until the 
world seemed to him to be made of fra- 
grant spices, green fruit, raisins, and pastry, 
— a world that he was only yet allowed to 
enjoy through his nose. How filled the 
house was with the most delicious smells ! 

61 



BEING A BOY 

The mince-pies that were made! If John 
had been shut in solid walls with them 
piled about him, he could n't have eaten his 
way out in four weeks. There were dain- 
ties enough cooked in those two weeks to 
have made the entire year luscious with 
good living, if they had been scattered 
along in it. But people were probably all 
the better for scrimping themselves a little 
in order to make this a great feast. And 
it was not by any means over in a day. 
There were weeks deep of chicken-pie and 
other pastry. The cold buttery was a cave 
of Aladdin, and it took a long time to ex- 
cavate all its riches. 

Thanksgiving Day itself was a heavy day, 
the hilarity of it being so subdued by going 
to meeting, and the universal wearing of 
the Sunday clothes, that the boy couldn't 
see it. But if he felt little exhilaration, he 
ate a great deal. The next day was the 
real holiday. Then were the merry-making 
parties, and perhaps the skatings and sleigh- 
rides, for the freezing weather came before 
the governor's proclamation in many parts 
of New England. The night after Thanks- 

62 



THE COMING OF THANKSGIVING 

giving occurred, perhaps, the first real party 
that the boy had ever attended, with live 
girls in it, dressed so bewitchingly. And 
there he heard those philandering songs, 
and played those sweet games of forfeits, 
which put him quite beside himself, and 
kept him awake that night till the rooster 
crowed at the end of his first chicken-nap. 
What a new world did that party open to 
him ! I think it likely that he saw there, 
and probably did not dare say ten words to, 
some tall, graceful girl, much older than 
himself, who seemed to him like a new 
order of being. He could see her face just 
as plainly in the darkness of his chamber. 
He wondered if she noticed how awkward 
he was, and how short his trousers-legs 
were. He blushed as he thought of his 
rather ill-fitting shoes ; and determined, 
then and there, that he would n't be put off 
with a ribbon any longer, but would have 
a young man's necktie. It was somewhat 
painful thinking the party over, but it was 
delicious too. He did not think, probably, 
that he would die for that tall, handsome 
girl ; he did not put it exactly in that way. 

£>3 



BEING A BOY 

But he rather resolved to live for her, — 
which might in the end amount to the 
same thing. At least, he thought that no- 
body would live to speak twice disrespect- 
fully of her in his presence. 

64 



IX 

THE SEASON OF PUMPKIN-PIE 

What John said was, that he did n't care 
much for pumpkin-pie ; but that was after 
he had eaten a whole one. It seemed to 
him then that mince would be better. 

The feeling of a boy towards pumpkin-pie 
has never been properly considered. There 
is an air of festivity about its approach in 
the fall. The boy is willing to help pare 
and cut up the pumpkin, and he watches 
with the greatest interest the stirring-up 
process and the pouring into the scalloped 
crust. When the sweet savor of the bak- 
ing reaches his nostrils, he is filled with the 
most delightful anticipations. Why should 
he not be ? He knows that for months to 
come the buttery will contain golden treas- 
ures, and that it will require only a slight 
ingenuity to get at them. 

The fact is, that the boy is as good in 
65 



BEING A BOY 

the buttery as in any part of farming. His 
elders say that the boy is always hungry ; 
but that is a very coarse way to put it. He 
has only recently come into a world that is 
full of good things to eat, and there is on 
the whole a very short time in which to eat 
them ; at least he is told, among the first 
information he receives, that life is short. 
Life being brief, and pie and the like fleet- 
ing, he very soon decides upon an active 
campaign. It may be an old story' to peo- 
ple who have been eating for forty or fifty 
years, but it is different with a beginner. 
He takes the thick and thin as it comes, as 
to pie, for instance. Some people do make 
them very thin. I knew a place where 
they were not thicker than the poor man's 
plaster ; they were spread so thin upon the 
crust that they were better fitted to draw 
out hunger than to satisfy it. They used 
to be made up by the great oven-full and 
kept in the dry cellar, where they hardened 
and dried to a toughness you would hardly 
believe. This was a long time ago, and 
they make the pumpkin-pie in the country 
better now, or the race of boys would have 

66 



THE SEASON OF PUMPKIN-PIE 

been so discouraged that I think they would 
have stopped coming into the world. 

The truth is, that boys have always been 
so plenty that they are not half appreciated. 
We have shown that a farm could not get 
along without them, and yet their rights 
are seldom recognized. One of the most 
amusing things is their effort to acquire 
personal property. The boy has the care 
of the calves ; they always need feeding or 
shutting up or letting out ; when the boy 
wants to play, there are those calves to be 
looked after, — until he gets to hate the 
name of calf. But in consideration of his 
faithfulness, two of them are given to him. 
There is no doubt that they are his ; he has 
the entire charge of them. When they get 
to be steers, he spends all his holidays in 
breaking them in to a yoke. He gets them 
so broken in that they will run like a pair 
of deer all over the farm, turning the yoke, 
and kicking their heels, while he follows in 
full chase, shouting the ox language till he 
is red in the face. When the steers grow 
up to be cattle, a drover one day comes 
along and takes them away, and the boy is 

67 



BEING A BOY 

told that he can have another pair of 
calves ; and so, with undiminished faith, he 
goes back and begins over again to make 
his fortune. He owns lambs and young 
colts in the same way, and makes just as 
much out of them. 

There are ways in which the farmer-boy 
can earn money, as by gathering the early 
chestnuts and taking them to the Corner 
store, or by finding turkeys' eggs and sell- 
ing them to his mother ; and another way is 
to go without butter at the table, — but the 
money thus made is for the heathen. John 
read in Dr. Livingstone that some of the 
tribes in Central Africa (which is repre- 
sented by a blank spot in the atlas) use 
the butter to grease their hair, putting on 
pounds of it at a time ; and he said he had 
rather eat his butter than have it put to 
that use, especially as it melted away so 
fast in that hot climate. 

Of course it was explained to John that 
the missionaries do not actually carry butter 
to Africa, and that they must usually go 
without it themselves there, it being almost 
impossible to make it good from the milk 

68 



THE SEASON OF PUMPKIN-PIE 

in the cocoanuts. And it was further 
explained to him that, even if the heathen 
never received his butter or the money for 
it, it was an excellent thing for a boy to cul- 
tivate the habit of self-denial and of benev- 
olence, and if the heathen never heard of 
him he would be blessed for his generosity. 
This was all true. 

But John said that he was tired of sup- 
porting the heathen out of his butter, and 
he wished the rest of the family would also 
stop eating butter and save the money for 
missions ; and he wanted to know where 
the other members of the family got their 
money to send to the heathen ; and his 
mother said that he was about half right, 
and that self-denial was just as good for 
grown people as it was for little boys and 
girls. 

The boy is not always slow to take what 
he considers his rights. Speaking of those 
thin pumpkin-pies kept in the cellar cup- 
board, I used to know a boy who after- 
wards grew to be a selectman, and brushed 
his hair straight up like General Jackson, 
and went to the legislature, where he al- 

69 



BEING A BOY 

ways voted against every measure that was 
proposed, in the most honest manner, and 
got the reputation of being the " watch-dog 
of the treasury." Rats in the cellar were 
nothing to be compared to this boy for de- 
structiveness in pies. He used to go down, 
whenever he could make an excuse, to get 
apples for the family, or draw a mug of 
cider for his dear old grandfather (who was 
a famous story-teller about the Revolu- 
tionary War, and would no doubt have been 
wounded in battle if he had not been as 
prudent as he was patriotic), and come up 
stairs with a tallow candle in one hand and 
the apples or cider in the other, looking as 
innocent and as unconscious as if he had 
never done anything in his life except deny 
himself butter for the sake of the heathen. 
And yet this boy would have buttoned 
under his jacket an entire round pumpkin- 
pie. And the pie was so well made and so 
dry that it was not injured in the least, and 
it never hurt the boy's clothes a bit more 
than if it had been inside of him instead 
of outside ; and this boy would retire to a 
secluded place and eat it with another boy, 

70 



THE SEASON OF PUMPKIN-PIE 

being never suspected, because he was not 
in the cellar long enough to eat a pie, and he 
never appeared to have one about him. But 
he did something worse than this. When 
his mother saw that pie after pie departed, 
she told the family that she suspected 
the hired man ; and the boy never said a 
word, which was the meanest kind of lying. 
That hired man was probably regarded with 
suspicion by the family to the end of his 
days, and if he had been accused of robbing 
they would have believed him guilty. 

I should n't wonder if that selectman 
occasionally has remorse now about that 
pie ; dreams, perhaps, that it is buttoned up 
under his jacket and sticking to him like a 
breastplate ; that it lies upon his stomach like 
a round and red-hot nightmare, eating into 
his vitals. Perhaps not. It is difficult to 
say exactly what was the sin of stealing 
that kind of pie, especially if the one who 
stole it ate it. It could have been used for 
the game of pitching quoits, and a pair of 
them would have made very fair wheels for 
the dog-cart. And yet it is probably as 
wrong to steal a thin pie as a thick one ; 

7i 



BEING A BOY 

and it made no difference because it was 
easy to steal this sort. Easy stealing is no 
better than easy lying, where detection of 
the lie is difficult. The boy who steals his 
mother's pies has no right to be surprised 
when some other boy steals his watermel- 
ons. Stealing is like charity in one respect, 
— it is apt to begin at home. 

72 



X 

FIRST EXPERIENCE OF THE WORLD 

If I were forced to be a boy, and a boy 
in the country, — the best kind of boy to 
be in the summer, — I would be about 
ten years of age. As soon as I got any 
older, I would quit it. The trouble with 
a boy is that just as he begins to enjoy 
himself he is too old, and has to be set to 
doing something else. If a country boy 
were wise he would stay at just that age 
when he could enjoy himself most, and 
have the least expected of him in the way 
of work. 

Of course the perfectly good boy will 
always prefer to work, and to do " chores" 
for his father and errands for his mother 
and sisters, rather than enjoy himself in his 
own way. I never saw but one such boy. 
He lived in the town of Goshen, — not the 
place where the butter is made, but a much 

73 



BEING A BOY 

better Goshen than that. And I never saw 
him, but I heard of him ; and being about 
the same age, as I supposed, I was taken 
once from Zoar, where I lived, to Goshen 
to see him. But he was dead. He had 
been dead almost a year, so that it was im- 
possible to see him. He died of the most 
singular disease : it was from not eating 
green apples in the season of them. This 
boy, whose name was Solomon, before he 
died would rather split up kindling-wood 
for his mother than go a-fishing : the con- 
sequence was, that he was kept at splitting 
kindling-wood and such work most of the 
time, and grew a better and more useful 
boy day by day. Solomon would not dis- 
obey his parents and eat green apples, — 
not even when they were ripe enough to 
knock off with a stick, -— but he had such 
a longing for them that he pined and 
passed away. If he had eaten the green 
apples he would have died of them, proba- 
bly ; so that his example is a difficult one 
to follow. In fact, a boy is a hard subject 
to get a moral from. All his little play- 
mates who ate green apples came to Solo- 

74 



FIRST EXPERIENCE OF THE WORLD 

mon's funeral, and were very sorry for 
what they had done. 

John was a very different boy from Solo- 
mon, not half so good, nor half so dead. 
He was a farmer's boy, as Solomon was, but 
he did not take so much interest in the 
farm. If John could have had his way he 
would have discovered a cave full of dia- 
monds, and lots of nail-kegs full of gold- 
pieces and Spanish dollars, with a pretty 
little girl living in the cave, and two beauti- 
fully caparisoned horses, upon which, tak- 
ing the jewels and money, they would have 
ridden off together, he did not know where. 
John had got thus far in his studies, which 
were apparently arithmetic and geography, 
but were in reality the Arabian Nights, and 
other books of high and mighty adventure. 
He was a simple country boy, and did not 
know much about the world as it is, but he 
had one of his own imagination, in which 
he lived a good deal. I dare say he found 
out soon enough what the world is, and he 
had a lesson or two when he was quite 
young, in two incidents, which I may as 
well relate. 

IS 



BEING A BOY 

If you had seen John at this time, you 
might have thought he was only a shabbily 
dressed country lad, and you never would 
have guessed what beautiful thoughts he 
sometimes had as he went stubbing his 
toes along the dusty road, nor what a chiv- 
alrous little fellow he was. You would 
have seen a short boy, barefooted, with 
trousers at once too big and too short, held 
up, perhaps, by one suspender only ; a 
checked cotton shirt ; and a hat of braided 
palmleaf , frayed at the edges and bulged up 
in the crown. It is impossible to keep a 
hat neat if you use it to catch bumble-bees 
and whisk 'em ; to bail the water from 
a leaky boat ; to catch minnows in ; to 
put over honey-bees' nests ; and to trans- 
port pebbles, strawberries, and hens' eggs. 
John usually carried a sling in his hand, or 
a bow, or a limber stick sharp at one end, 
from which he could sling apples a great 
distance. If he walked in the road, he 
walked in the middle of it, shuffling up the 
dust ; or, if he went elsewhere, he was likely 
to be running on the top of the fence or 
the stone-wall, and chasing chipmunks. 

76 



FIRST EXPERIENCE OF THE WORLD 

John knew the best place to dig sweet- 
nag in all the farm ; it was in a meadow by 
the river, where the bobolinks sang so 
gayly. He never liked to hear the bobo- 
link sing, however, for he said it always 
reminded him of the whetting of a scythe, 
and that reminded him of spreading hay; 
and if there was anything he hated it was 
spreading hay after the mowers. " I guess 
you wouldn't like it yourself," said John, 
" with the stubs getting into your feet, and 
the hot sun, and the men getting ahead of 
you, all you could do." 

Towards evening once, John was coming 
along the road home with some stalks of 
the sweet-flag in his hand ; there is a succu- 
lent pith in the end of the stalk which is 
very good to eat, tender, and not so strong 
as the root ; and John liked to pull it, and 
carry home what he did not eat on the way. 
As he was walking along he met a carriage, 
which stopped opposite to him ; he also 
stopped and bowed, as country boys used 
to bow in John's day. A lady leaned from 
the carriage and said, — 

"What have you got, little boy ? " 
17 



BEING A BOY 

She seemed to be the most beautiful wo- 
man John had ever seen ; with light hair, 
dark, tender eyes, and the sweetest smile. 
There was that in her gracious mien and in 
her dress which reminded John of the beau- 
tiful castle ladies, with whom he was well 
acquainted in books. He felt that he knew 
her at once, and he also seemed to be a sort 
of young prince himself. I fancy he did n't 
look much like one. But of his own ap- 
pearance he thought not at all, as he replied 
to the lady's question, without the least 
embarrassment, — 

"It's sweet-flag stalk; would you like 
some ? " 

" Indeed, I should like to taste it," said 
the lady, with a most winning smile. " I 
used to be very fond of it when I was a lit- 
tle girl." 

John was delighted that the lady should 
like sweet-flag, and that she was pleased to 
accept it from him. He thought himself 
that it was about the best thing to eat he 
knew. He handed up a large bunch of it. 
The lady took two or three stalks, and was 
about to return the rest, when John said, — 

78 



FIRST EXPERIENCE OF THE WORLD 

" Please keep it all, ma'am. I can get 
lots more. I know where it 's ever so 
thick." 

"Thank you, thank you," said the lady; 
and as the carriage started she reached out 
her hand to John. He did not understand 
the motion, until he saw a cent drop in the 
road at his feet. Instantly all his illusion 
and his pleasure vanished. Something like 
tears were in his eyes as he shouted, — 

"I don't want your cent. I don't sell 
flag ! " 

John was intensely mortified. "I sup- 
pose," he said, "she thought I was a sort of 
beggar-boy. To think of selling flag ! " 

At any rate, he walked away and left the 
cent in the road, a humiliated boy. The 
next day he told Jim Gates about it. Jim 
said he was green not to take the money ; 
he'd go and look for it now, if he would 
tell him about where it dropped. And Jim 
did spend an hour poking about in the dirt, 
but he did not find the cent. Jim, how- 
ever, had an idea : he said he was going to 
dig sweet-flag, and see if another carriage 
would n't come along. 

79 



BEING A BOY 

John's next rebuff and knowledge of the 
world was of another sort. He was again 
walking the road at twilight, when he was 
overtaken by a wagon with one seat, upon 
which were two pretty girls, and a young 
gentleman sat between them driving. It 
was a merry party, and John could hear 
them laughing and singing as they ap- 
proached him. The wagon stopped when 
it overtook him, and one of the sweet-faced 
girls leaned from the seat and said, quite 
seriously and pleasantly, — 

" Little boy, how 's your mar ? " 
John was surprised and puzzled for a mo- 
ment. He had never seen the young lady, 
but he thought that she perhaps knew his 
mother ; at any rate his instinct of polite- 
ness made him say, — 

" She 's pretty well, I thank you." 

" Does she know you are out ? " 

And thereupon all three in the wagon 

burst into a roar of laughter and dashed on. 

It flashed upon John in a moment that 

he had been imposed on, and it hurt him 

dreadfully. His self-respect was injured 

somehow, and he felt as if his lovely, gentle 

80 



FIRST EXPERIENCE OF THE WORLD 

mother had been insulted. He would like 
to have thrown a stone at the wagon, and 
in a rage he cried, — 

"You're a nice" — But he couldn't 
think of any hard, bitter words quick 
enough. 

Probably the young lady, who might have 
been almost any young lady, never knew 
what a cruel thing she had done. 

81 



XI 

HOME INVENTIONS 

The winter season is not all sliding down 
hill for the farmer-boy by any means ; yet 
he contrives to get as much fun out of it as 
from any part of the year. There is a dif- 
ference in boys : some are always jolly, and 
some go scowling always through life as if 
they had a stone-bruise on each heel, I 
like a jolly boy. 

I used to know one who came round 
every morning to sell molasses candy, offer- 
ing two sticks for a cent apiece ; it was 
worth fifty cents a day to see his cheery 
face. That boy rose in the world. He is 
now the owner of a large town at the West. 
To be sure, there are no houses in it except 
his own ; but there is a map of it and roads 
and streets are laid out on it, with dwell- 
ings and churches and academies and a 
college and an opera-house, and you could 

82 



HOME INVENTIONS 

scarcely tell it from Springfield or Hart- 
ford, on paper. He and all his family have 
the fever and ague, and shake worse than 
the people at Lebanon : but they do not 
mind it ; it makes them lively, in fact. Ed 
May is just as jolly as he used to be. He 
calls his town Mayopolis, and expects to be 
mayor of it ; his wife, however, calls the 
town Maybe. 

The farmer-boy likes to have winter 
come, for one thing, because it freezes up 
the ground so that he can't dig in it ; and 
it is covered with snow, so that there is no 
picking up stones, nor driving the cows to 
pasture. He would have a very easy time 
if it were not for the getting up before day- 
light to build the fires and do the " chores." 
Nature intended the long winter nights for 
the farmer-boy to sleep ; but in my day he 
was expected to open his sleepy eyes when 
the cock crew, get out of the warm bed and 
light a candle, struggle into his cold panta- 
loons, and pull on boots in which the ther- 
mometer would have gone down to zero, 
rake open the coals on the hearth and start 
the morning fire, and then go to the barn 

83 



BEING A BOY 

to "fodder." The frost was thick on the 
kitchen windows ; the snow was drifted 
against the door; and the journey to the 
barn, in the pale light of dawn, over the 
creaking snow, was like an exile's trip to 
Siberia. The boy was not half awake when 
he stumbled into the cold barn, and was 
greeted by the lowing and bleating and 
neighing of cattle waiting for their break- 
fast. How their breath steamed up from 
the mangers, and hung in frosty spears 
from their noses ! Through the great lofts 
above the hay, where the swallows nested, 
the winter wind whistled and the snow 
sifted. Those old barns were well venti- 
lated. 

I used to spend much valuable time in 
planning a barn that should be tight and 
warm, with a fire in it if necessary in order 
to keep the temperature somewhere near 
the freezing point. I could n't see how the 
cattle could live in a place where a lively 
boy, full of young blood, would freeze to 
death in a short time if he did not swing 
his arms and slap his hands, and jump 
about like a goat. I thought I would have 

84 



HOME INVENTIONS 

a sort of perpetual manger that should 
shake down the hay when it was wanted, 
and a self-acting machine that should cut 
up the turnips and pass them into the 
mangers, and water always flowing for the 
cattle and horses to drink. With these 
simple arrangements I could lie in bed, and 
know that the "chores" were doing them- 
selves. It would also be necessary, in order 
that I should not be disturbed, that the 
crow should be taken out of the roosters, 
but I could think of no process to do it. 
It seems to me that the hen-breeders, if 
they know as much as they say they do, 
might raise a breed of crowless roosters, 
for the benefit of boys, quiet neighbor- 
hoods, and sleepy families. 

There was another notion that I had, 
about kindling the kitchen fire, that I never 
carried out. It was, to have a spring at the 
head of my bed, connecting with a wire, 
which should run to a torpedo which I 
would plant overnight in the ashes of the 
fireplace. By touching the spring I could 
explode the torpedo, which would scatter 
the ashes and uncover the live coals, and at 

85 



BEING A BOY 

the same time shake down the sticks of 
wood which were standing by the side of 
the ashes in the chimney, and the fire 
would kindle itself. This ingenious plan 
was frowned on by the whole family, who 
said they did not want to be waked up 
every morning by an explosion. And yet 
they expected me to wake up without an 
explosion. A boy's plans for making life 
agreeable are hardly ever heeded. 

I never knew a boy farmer who was not 
eager to go to the district school in the 
winter. There is such a chance for learn- 
ing, that he must be a dull boy who does 
not come out in the spring a fair skater, an 
accurate snowballer, and an accomplished 
slider downhill, with or without a board, on 
his seat, on his stomach, or on his feet. 
Take a moderate hill, with a foot -slide 
down it worn to icy smoothness, and a 
"go-round " of boys on it, and there is no- 
thing like it for whittling away boot-leather. 
The boy is the shoemaker's friend. An 
active lad can wear down a pair of cowhide 
soles in a week so that the ice will scrape 
his toes. Sledding or coasting is also slow 

86 



HOME INVENTIONS 

fun compared to the "bareback" sliding 
down a steep hill over a hard, glistening 
crust. It is not only dangerous, but it is 
destructive to jacket and pantaloons to a 
degree to make a tailor laugh. If any other 
animal wore out his skin as fast as a school- 
boy wears out his clothes in winter, it would 
need a new one once a month. In a coun- 
try district-school, patches were not by any 
means a sign of poverty, but of the boy's 
courage and adventurous disposition. Our 
elders used to threaten to dress us in 
leather and put sheet - iron seats in our 
trousers. The boy said that he wore out 
his trousers on the hard seats in the 
school-house ciphering hard sums. For 
that extraordinary statement he received 
two castigations, — one at home, that was 
mild, and one from the schoolmaster, who 
was careful to lay the rod upon the boy's 
sliding-place, punishing him, as he jocosely 
called it, on a sliding scale, according to 
the thinness of his pantaloons. 

What I liked best at school, however, 
was the study of history, early history, the 
Indian wars. We studied it mostly at 

87 



BEING A BOY 

noontime, and we had it illustrated as the 
children nowadays have "object-lessons," 
— though our object was not so much to 
have lessons as it was to revive real history. 
Back of the school-house rose a round 
hill, upon which tradition said had stood in 
colonial times a block-house, built by the 
settlers for defense against the Indians. 
For the Indians had the idea that the 
whites were not settled enough, and used 
to come nights to settle them with a toma- 
hawk. It was called Fort Hill. It was 
very steep on each side, and the river ran 
close by. It was a charming place in sum- 
mer, where one could find laurel, and 
checkerberries, and sassafras roots, and sit 
in the cool breeze, looking at the moun- 
tains across the river, and listening to the 
murmur of the Deerfield. The Methodists 
built a meeting-house there afterwards, but 
the hill was so slippery in winter that the 
aged could not climb it, and the wind raged 
so fiercely that it blew nearly all the young 
Methodists away (many of whom were after- 
wards heard of in the West), and finally 
the meeting-house itself came down into 




IN SCHOOL 



HOME INVENTIONS 

the valley and grew a steeple, and enjoyed 
itself ever afterwards. It used to be a no- 
tion in New England that a meeting-house 
ought to stand as near heaven as possible. 

The boys at our school divided them- 
selves into two parties ; one was the Early 
Settlers and the other the Pequots, the 
latter the most numerous. The Early Set- 
tlers built a snow fort on the hill, and a 
strong fortress it was, constructed of snow- 
balls rolled up to a vast size (larger than 
the Cyclopean blocks of stone which form 
the ancient Etruscan walls in Italy), piled 
one upon another, and the whole cemented 
by pouring on water which froze and made 
the walls solid. The Pequots helped the 
whites build it. It had a covered way 
under the snow, through which only could 
it be entered, and it had bastions and towers 
and openings to fire from, and a great many 
other things for which there are no names 
in military books. And it had a glacis and 
a ditch outside. 

When it was completed, the Early Set- 
tlers, leaving the women in the school- 
house, a prey to the Indians, used to retire 

89 



BEING A BOY 

into it, and await the attack of the Pequots. 
There was only a handful of the garrison, 
while the Indians were many, and also bar- 
barous. It was agreed that they should be 
barbarous. And it was in this light that 
the great question was settled whether a 
boy might snowball with balls that he had 
soaked over night in water and let freeze. 
They were as hard as cobblestones, and if 
a boy should be hit in the head by one of 
them he could not tell whether he was a 
Pequot or an Early Settler. It was con- 
sidered as unfair to use these ice-balls in 
an open fight, as it is to use poisoned am- 
munition in real war. But as the whites 
were protected by the fort, and the Indians 
were treacherous by nature, it was decided 
that the latter might use the hard missiles. 

The Pequots used to come swarming up 
the hill, with hideous war-whoops, attacking 
the fort on all sides with great noise and a 
shower of balls. The garrison replied with 
yells of defiance and well-directed shots, 
hurling back the invaders when they at- 
tempted to scale the walls. The Settlers 
had the advantage of position, but they 

90 



HOME INVENTIONS 

were sometimes overpowered by numbers, 
and would often have had to surrender 
but for the ringing of the school-bell. The 
Pequots were in great fear of the school- 
bell. 

I do not remember that the whites ever 
hauled down their flag and surrendered vol- 
untarily ; but once or twice the fort was 
carried by storm and the garrison were mas- 
sacred to a boy, and thrown out of the for- 
tress, having been first scalped. To take a 
boy's cap was to scalp him, and after that 
he was dead, if he played fair. There were 
a great many hard hits given and taken, but 
always cheerfully, for it was in the cause of 
our early history. The history of Greece 
and Rome was stuff compared to this. And 
we had many boys in our school who could 
imitate the Indian war-whoop enough better 
than they could scan anna, virumqiie cano. 

9i 



XII 

THE LONELY FARM-HOUSE 

The winter evenings of the farmer-boy 
in New England used not to be so gay as 
to tire him of the pleasures of life before 
he became of age. A remote farm-house, 
standing a little off the road, banked up 
with sawdust and earth to keep the frost 
out of the cellar, blockaded with snow, and 
flying a blue flag of smoke from its chim- 
ney, looks like a besieged fort. On cold 
and stormy winter nights, to the traveler 
wearily dragging along in his creaking 
sleigh, the light from its windows suggests 
a house of refuge and the cheer of a blazing 
fire. But it is no less a fort, into which 
the family retire when the New England 
winter on the hills really sets in. 

The boy is an important part of the gar- 
rison. He is not only one of the best 
means of communicating with the outer 

92 



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THE LONELY FARM-HOUSE 

world, but he furnishes half the entertain- 
ment and takes two thirds of the scolding 
of the family circle. A farm would come 
to grief without a boy on it, but it is impos- 
sible to think of a farm-house without a 
boy in it. 

"That boy" brings life into the house ; 
his tracks are to be seen everywhere, he 
leaves all the doors open, he has n't half 
filled the wood-box, he makes noise enough 
to wake the dead ; or he is in a brown-study 
by the fire and cannot be stirred, or he 
has fastened a grip upon some Crusoe book 
which cannot easily be shaken off. I sup- 
pose that the farmer-boy's evenings are not 
now what they used to be ; that he has 
more books, and less to do, and is not half 
so good a boy as formerly, when he used to 
think the almanac was pretty lively reading, 
and the comic almanac, if he could get hold 
of that, was a supreme delight. 

Of course he had the evenings to him- 
self after he had done the " chores " at the 
barn, brought in the wood and piled it high 
in the box, ready to be heaped upon the 
great open fire. It was nearly dark when 

93 



BEING A BOY 

he came from school (with its continuation 
of snowballing and sliding), and he always 
had an agreeable time stumbling and fum- 
bling around in barn and woodhouse in the 
waning light. 

John used to say that he supposed no- 
body would do his "chores" if he did not 
get home till midnight ; and he was never 
contradicted. Whatever happened to him, 
and whatever length of days or sort of 
weather was produced by the almanac, the 
cardinal rule was that he should be at home 
before dark. 

John used to imagine what people did 
in the dark ages, and wonder sometimes 
whether he was n't still in them. 

Of course, John had nothing to do all 
the evening, after his "chores," — except 
little things. While he drew his chair up 
to the table in order to get the full radiance 
of the tallow candle on his slate or his book, 
the women of the house also sat by the 
table knitting and sewing. The head of 
the house sat in his chair, tipped back 
against the chimney ; the hired man was 
in danger of burning his boots in the fire. 

94 



THE LONELY FARM-HOUSE 

John might be deep in the excitement of a 
bear story, or be hard at writing a "com- 
position" on his greasy slate; but, what- 
ever he was doing, he was the only one who 
could always be interrupted. It was he 
who must snuff the candles, and put on a 
stick of wood, and toast the cheese, and 
turn the apples, and crack the nuts. He 
knew where the fox-and-geese board was, 
and he could find the twelve-men-Morris. 
Considering that he was expected to go to 
bed at eight o'clock, one would say that 
the opportunity for study was not great, 
and that his reading was rather interrupted. 
There seemed to be always something for 
him to do, even when all the rest of the 
family came as near being idle as is ever 
possible in a New England household. 

No wonder that John was not sleepy at 
eight o'clock : he had been flying about 
while the others had been yawning before 
the fire. He would like to sit up just to 
see how much more solemn and stupid it 
would become as the night went on ; he 
wanted to tinker his skates, to mend his 
sled, to finish that chapter. Why should 

95 



BEING A BOY 

he go away from that bright blaze, and the 
company that sat in its radiance, to the cold 
and solitude of his chamber ? Why did n't 
the people who were sleepy go to bed ? 

How lonesome the old house was ; how 
cold it was, away from that great central 
fire in the heart of it ; how its timbers 
creaked as if in the contracting pinch of 
the frost ; what a rattling there was of win- 
dows, what a concerted attack upon the 
clapboards ; how the floors squeaked, and 
what gusts from round corners came to 
snatch the feeble flame of the candle from 
the boy's hand ! How he shivered, as he 
paused at the staircase window to look out 
upon the great fields of snow, upon the 
stripped forest, through which he could 
hear the wind raving in a kind of fury, and 
up at the black flying clouds, amid which 
the young moon was dashing and driven on 
like a frail shallop at sea ! And his teeth 
chattered more than ever when he got into 
the icy sheets, and drew himself up into a 
ball in his flannel nightgown, like a fox in 
his hole. 

For a little time he could hear the noises 
96 



THE LONELY FARM-HOUSE 

downstairs, and an occasional laugh ; he 
could guess that now they were having 
cider, and now apples were going round ; 
and he could feel the wind tugging at the 
house, even sometimes shaking the bed. 
But this did not last long. He soon went 
away into a country he always delighted to 
be in ; a calm place where the wind never 
blew, and no one dictated the time of going 
to bed to any one else. I like to think of 
him sleeping there, in such rude surround- 
ings, ingenuous, innocent, mischievous, with 
no thought of the buffeting he is to get 
from a world that has a good many worse 
places for a boy than the hearth of an old 
farm-house, and the sweet though unde- 
monstrative affection of its family life. 

But there were other evenings in the 
boy's life that were different from these at 
home, and one of them he will never forget. 
It opened a new world to John, and set him 
into a great flutter. It produced a revolu- 
tion in his mind in regard to neckties ; it 
made him wonder if greased boots were 
quite the thing compared with blacked 
boots ; and he wished he had a long look- 

97 



BEING A BOY 

ing-glass, so that he could see, as he walked 
away from it, what was the effect of round 
patches on the portion of his trousers he 
could not see except in a mirror; and if 
patches were quite stylish, even on every- 
day trousers. And he began to be very 
much troubled about the parting of his 
hair, and how to find out on which side was 
the natural part. 

The evening to which I refer was that of 
John's first party. He knew the girls at 
school, and he was interested in some of 
them with a different interest from that he 
took in the boys. He never wanted to 
" take it out " with one of them, for an in- 
sult, in a stand-up fight, and he instinctively 
softened a boy's natural rudeness when he 
was with them. He would help a timid 
little girl to stand erect and slide ; he would 
draw her on his sled, till his hands were 
stiff with cold, without a murmur ; he would 
generously give her red apples into which 
he longed to set his own sharp teeth ; and 
he would cut in two his lead-pencil for a 
girl, when he would not for a boy. Had he 
not some of the beautiful auburn tresses of 

98 



THE LONELY FARM-HOUSE 

Cynthia Rudd in his skate, spruce-gum, and 
wintergreen box at home ? And yet the 
grand sentiment of life was little awakened 
in John. He liked best to be with boys, 
and their rough play suited him better than 
the amusements of the shrinking, flutter- 
ing, timid, and sensitive little girls. John 
had not learned then that a spider-web is 
stronger than a cable ; or that a pretty little 
girl could turn him round her finger a great 
deal easier than a big bully of a boy could 
make him cry "enough." 

John had indeed been at spelling-schools, 
and had accomplished the feat of "going 
home with a girl" afterwards ; and he had 
been growing into the habit of looking 
around in meeting on Sunday, and noticing 
how Cynthia was dressed, and not enjoying 
the service quite as much if Cynthia was 
absent as when she was present. But there 
was very little sentiment in all this, and no- 
thing whatever to make John blush at hear- 
ing her name. 

But now John was invited to a regular 
party. There was the invitation, in a three- 
cornered billet, sealed with a transparent 

99 



BEING A BOY 

wafer : " Miss C. Rudd requests the plea- 
sure of the company of," etc., all in blue 
ink, and the finest kind of pin - scratching 
writing. What a precious document it was 
to John ! It even exhaled a faint sort of 
perfume, whether of lavender or caraway- 
seed he could not tell. He read it over a 
hundred times, and showed it confidentially 
to his favorite cousin, who had beaux of 
her own, and had even "sat up " with them 
in the parlor. And from this sympathetic 
cousin John got advice as to what he should 
wear and how he should conduct himself at 
the party. 

ioo 



XIII 

John's first party 

It turned out that John did not go after 
all to Cynthia Rudd's party, having broken 
through the ice on the river when he was 
skating that day, and, as the boy who pulled 
him out said, " come within an inch of his 
life." But he took care not to tumble into 
anything that should keep him from the 
next party, which was given with due for- 
mality by Melinda Mayhew. 

John had been many a time to the house 
of Deacon Mayhew, and never with any 
hesitation, even if he knew that both the 
deacon's daughters — Melinda and Sophro- 
nia — were at home. The only fear he had 
felt was of the deacon's big dog, who always 
surlily watched him as he came up the tan- 
bark walk, and made a rush at him if he 
showed the least sign of wavering. But 
upon the night of the party his courage 

IOI 



BEING A BOY 

vanished, and he thought he would rather 
face all the dogs in town than knock at the 
front door. 

The parlor was lighted up, and as John 
stood on the broad flagging before the 
front door, by the lilac-bush, he could hear 
the sound of voices — girls' voices — which 
set his heart in a flutter. He could face 
the whole district school of girls without 
flinching, — he did n't mind 'em in the 
meeting-house in their Sunday best ; but 
he began to be conscious that now he was 
passing to a new sphere, where the girls are 
supreme and superior, and he began to feel 
for the first time that he was an awkward 
boy. The girl takes to society as naturally 
as a duckling does to the placid pond, but 
with a semblance of sly timidity ; the boy 
plunges in with a great splash, and hides 
his shy awkwardness in noise and commo- 
tion. 

When John entered, the company had 
nearly all come. He knew them every one, 
and yet there was something about them 
strange and unfamiliar. They were all a 
little afraid of each other, as people are apt 

102 



JOHN'S FIRST PARTY 

to be when they are well dressed and met 
together for social purposes in the country. 
To be at a real party was a novel thing for 
most of them, and put a constraint upon 
them which they could not at once over- 
come. Perhaps it was because they were 
in the awful parlor, that carpeted room of 
haircloth furniture, which was so seldom 
opened. Upon the wall hung two certifi- 
cates framed in black, — one certifying 
that, by the payment of fifty dollars, Dea- 
con Mayhew was a life member of the 
American Tract Society ; and the other 
that, by a like outlay of bread cast upon 
the waters, his wife was a life member of 
the A. B. C. F. M., a portion of the alpha- 
bet which has an awful significance to all 
New England childhood. These certificates 
are a sort of receipt in full for charity, and 
are a constant and consoling reminder to 
the farmer that he has discharged his reli- 
gious duties. 

There was a fire on the broad hearth, 
and that, with the tallow candles on the 
mantelpiece, made quite an illumination in 
the room, and enabled the boys, who were 

103 



BEING A BOY 

mostly on one side of the room, to see the 
girls, who were on the other, quite plainly. 
How sweet and demure the girls looked, to 
be sure ! Every boy was thinking if his 
hair was slick, and feeling the full embar- 
rassment of his entrance into fashionable 
life. It was queer that these children, who 
were so free everywhere else, should be so 
constrained now, and hot know what to do 
with themselves. The shooting of a spark 
out upon the carpet was a great relief, and 
was accompanied by a deal of scrambling 
to throw it back into the fire, and caused 
much giggling. It was only gradually that 
the formality was at all broken, and the 
young people got together and found their 
tongues. 

John at length found himself with Cyn- 
thia Rudd, to his great delight and con- 
siderable embarrassment, for Cynthia, who 
was older than John, never looked so 
pretty. To his surprise he had nothing to 
say to her. They had always found plenty 
to talk about before, but now nothing that 
he could think of seemed worth saying at a 
party. 

104 



JOHN'S FIRST PARTY 

" It is a pleasant evening," said John. 

" It is quite so," replied Cynthia. 

" Did you come in a cutter ? " asked 
John, anxiously. 

" No ; I walked on the crust, and it was 
perfectly lovely walking," said Cynthia, in 
a burst of confidence. 

"Was it slippery ? " continued John. 

"Not very." 

John hoped it would be slippery — very 
— when he walked home with Cynthia, as 
he determined to do, but he did not dare to 
say so, and the conversation ran aground 
again. John thought about his dog and his 
sled and his yoke of steers, but he did n't 
see any way to bring them into conversa- 
tion. Had she read the " Swiss Family 
Robinson"? Only a little ways. John said 
it was splendid, and he would lend it to her, 
for which she thanked him, and said, with 
such a sweet expression, she should be so 
glad to have it from him. That was en- 
couraging. 

And then John asked Cynthia if she had 
seen Sally Hawkes since the husking at 
their house, when Sally found so many red 

105 



BEING A BOY 

ears ; and did n't she think she was a real 
pretty girl ? 

" Yes, she was right pretty ; " and Cyn- 
thia guessed that Sally knew it pretty well. 
But did John like the color of her eyes ? 

No ; John did n't like the color of her 
eyes exactly. 

"Her mouth would be well enough if 
she did n't laugh so much and show her 
teeth." 

John said her mouth was her worst fea- 
ture. 

" Oh no," said Cynthia, warmly ; " her 
mouth is better than her nose." 

John did n't know but it was better than 
her nose, and he should like her looks bet- 
ter if her hair was n't so dreadful black. 

But Cynthia, who could afford to be gen- 
erous now, said she liked black hair, and 
she wished hers was dark. Whereupon 
John protested that he liked light hair — 
auburn hair — of all things. 

And Cynthia said that Sally was a dear, 
good girl, and she did n't believe one word 
of the story that she only really found one 
red ear at the husking that night, and hid 

1 06 



JOHN'S FIRST PARTY 

that and kept pulling it out as if it were a 
new one. 

And so the conversation, once started, 
went on as briskly as possible about the 
paring-bee and the spelling-school, and the 
new singing-master who was coming, and 
how Jack Thompson had gone to North- 
ampton to be a clerk in a store, and how 
Elvira Reddington, in the geography class 
at school, was asked what was the capital of 
Massachusetts, and had answered " North- 
ampton," and all the school laughed. John 
enjoyed the conversation amazingly, and he 
half wished that he and Cynthia were the 
whole of the party. 

But the party had meantime got into 
operation, and the formality was broken up 
when the boys and girls had ventured out 
of the parlor into the more comfortable liv- 
ing-room, with its easy-chairs and every-day 
things, and even gone so far as to penetrate 
the kitchen in their frolic. As soon as 
they forgot they were a party, they began 
to enjoy themselves. 

But the real pleasure only began with 
the games. The party was nothing with- 

107 



BEING A BOY 

out the games, and indeed it was made for 
the games. Very likely it was one of the 
timid girls who proposed to play something, 
and when the ice was once broken, the 
whole company went into the business en- 
thusiastically. There was no dancing. We 
should hope not. Not in the deacon's 
house ; not with the deacon's daughters, 
nor anywhere in this good Puritanic so- 
ciety. Dancing was a sin in itself, and no 
one could tell what it would lead to. But 
there was no reason why the boys and girls 
should n't come together and kiss each 
other during a whole evening occasionally. 
Kissing was a sign of peace, and was not at 
all like taking hold of hands and skipping 
about to the scraping of a wicked fiddle. 

In the games there was a great deal of 
clasping hands, of going round in a circle, 
of passing under each other's elevated 
arms, of singing about my true love, and 
the end was kisses distributed with more 
or less partiality according to the rules of 
the play ; but, thank Heaven, there was no 
fiddler. John liked it all, and was quite 
brave about paying all the forfeits imposed 

1 08 



JOHN'S FIRST PARTY 

on him, even to the kissing all the girls in 
the room ; but he thought he could have 
amended that by kissing a few of them a 
good many times instead of kissing them 
all once. 

But John was destined to have a damper 
put upon his enjoyment. They were play- 
ing a most fascinating game, in which they 
all stand in a circle and sing a philandering 
song, except one who is in the centre of 
the ring and holds a cushion. At a certain 
word in the song, the one in the centre 
throws the cushion at the feet of some one 
in the ring, indicating thereby the choice 
of a mate, and then the two sweetly kneel 
upon the cushion, like two meek angels, 
and — and so forth. Then the chosen one 
takes the cushion and the delightful play 
goes on. It is very easy, as it will be seen, 
to learn how to play it. Cynthia was hold- 
ing the cushion, and at the fatal word she 
threw it down, — not before John, but in 
front of Ephraim Leggett. And they two 
kneeled, and so forth. John was astounded. 
He had never conceived of such perfidy in 
the female heart. He felt like wiping 

109 



BEING A BOY 

Ephraim off the face of the earth, only 
Ephraim was older and bigger than he. 
When it came his turn at length — thanks 
to a plain little girl for whose admiration he 
did n't care a straw — he threw the cushion 
down before Melinda Mayhew with all the 
devotion he could muster, and a dagger 
look at Cynthia. And Cynthia's perfidious 
smile only enraged him the more. John 
felt wronged, and worked himself up to 
pass a wretched evening. 

When supper came he never went near 
Cynthia, and busied himself in carrying dif- 
ferent kinds of pie and cake, and red apples 
and cider, to the girls he liked the least. 
He shunned Cynthia, and when he was ac- 
cidentally near her, and she asked him if 
he would get her a glass of cider, he rudely 
told her — like a goose as he was — that 
she had better ask Ephraim. That seemed 
to him very smart ; but he got more and 
more miserable, and began to feel that he 
was making himself ridiculous. 

Girls have a great deal more good sense 
in such matters than boys. Cynthia went 
to John, at length, and asked him simply 

no 



JOHN'S FIRST PARTY 

what the matter was. John blushed, and 
said that nothing was the matter. Cynthia 
said that it would n't do for two people 
always to be together at a party ; and so 
they made up, and John obtained permis- 
sion to " see " Cynthia home. 

It was after half past nine when the 
great festivities at the Deacon's broke up, 
and John walked home with Cynthia over 
the shining crust and under the stars. It 
was mostly a silent walk, for this was also 
an occasion when it is difficult to find any- 
thing fit to say. And John was thinking 
all the way how he should bid Cynthia good- 
night ; whether it would do and whether it 
would n't do, this not being a game, and no 
forfeits attaching to it. When they reached 
the gate there was an awkward little pause. 
John said the stars were uncommonly bright. 
Cynthia did not deny it, but waited a min- 
ute and then turned abruptly away, with 
" Good-night, John ! " 

" Good-night, Cynthia ! " 

And the party was over, and Cynthia 
was gone, and John went home in a kind 
of dissatisfaction with himself. 

in 



BEING A BOY 

It was long before he could go to sleep 
for thinking of the new world opened to 
him, and imagining how he would act under 
a hundred different circumstances, and what 
he would say, and what Cynthia would say ; 
but a dream at length came, and led him 
away to a great city and a brilliant house ; 
and while he was there he heard a loud 
rapping on the under floor, and saw that it 
was daylight. 

112 



XIV 

THE SUGAR CAMP 

I think there is no part of farming the 
boy enjoys more than the making of maple 
sugar; it is better than "blackberrying," 
and nearly as good as fishing. And one 
reason he likes this work is that somebody 
else does the most of it. It is a sort of 
work in which he can appear to be very 
active and yet not do much. 

And it exactly suits the temperament of 
a real boy to be very busy about nothing. 
If the power, for instance, that is expended 
in play by a boy between the ages of eight 
and fourteen could be applied to some in- 
dustry, we should see wonderful results. 
But a boy is like a galvanic battery that is 
not in connection with anything : he gener- 
ates electricity and plays it off into the air 
with the most reckless prodigality. And I, 
for one, would n't have it otherwise. It is 

113 



BEING A BOY 

as much a boy's business to play off his 
energies into space as it is for a flower to 
blow, or a catbird to sing snatches of the 
tunes of all the other birds. 

In my day, maple-sugar making used to be 
something between picnicking and being 
shipwrecked on a fertile island where one 
should save from the wreck tubs and augers, 
and great kettles and pork, and hen's-eggs 
and rye-and-indian bread, and begin at once 
to lead the sweetest life in the world. I am 
told that it is something different nowadays, 
and that there is more desire to save the 
sap, and make good, pure sugar, and sell it 
for a large price, than there used to be, and 
that the old fun and picturesqueness of the 
business are pretty much gone. I am told 
that it is the custom to carefully collect the 
sap and bring it to the house, where there 
are built brick arches, over which it is 
evaporated in shallow pans ; and that pains 
is taken to keep the leaves, sticks, and 
ashes and coals out of it ; and that the 
sugar is clarified ; and that, in short, it is 
a money-making business, in which there 
is very little fun, and that the boy is not 

114 



THE SUGAR CAMP 

allowed to dip his paddle into the kettle 
of boiling sugar and lick off the delicious 
sirup. The prohibition may improve the 
sugar, but it is cruel to the boy. 

As I remember the New England boy 
(and I am very intimate with one), he used 
to be on the qui vive in the spring for the 
sap to begin running. I think he discov- 
ered it as soon as anybody. Perhaps he 
knew it by a feeling of something starting 
in his own veins, — a sort of spring stir in 
his legs and arms, which tempted him to 
stand on his head, or throw a handspring, 
if he could find a spot of ground from which 
the snow had melted. The sap stirs early 
in the legs of a country boy, and shows 
itself in uneasiness in the toes, which get 
tired of boots, and want to come out and 
touch the soil just as soon as the sun has 
warmed it a little. The country boy goes 
barefoot just as naturally as the trees burst 
their buds, which were packed and varnished 
over in the fall to keep the water and the 
frost out. Perhaps the boy has been out 
digging into the maple-trees with his jack- 
knife ; at any rate, he is pretty sure to an- 

115 



BEING A BOY 

nounce the discovery as he comes running 
into the house in a great state of excitement 
— as if he had heard a hen cackle in the 
barn — with, " Sap 's runnin' ! " 

And then, indeed, the stir and excitement 
begin. The sap-buckets, which have been 
stored in the garret over the wood-house, 
and which the boy has occasionally climbed 
up to look at with another boy, for they 
are full of sweet suggestions of the annual 
spring frolic, — the sap-buckets are brought 
down and set out on the south side of the 
house and scalded. The snow is still a foot 
or two feet deep in the woods, and the 
ox-sled is got out to make a road to the 
sugar camp, and the campaign begins. The 
boy is everywhere present, superintending 
everything, asking questions, and filled with 
a desire to help the excitement. 

It is a great day when the cart is loaded 
with the buckets and the procession starts 
into the woods. The sun shines almost 
unobstructedly into the forest, for there 
are only naked branches to bar it ; the snow 
is soft and beginning to sink down, leaving 
the young bushes spindling up everywhere; 

116 



THE SUGAR CAMP 

the snow-birds are twittering about, and 
the noise of shouting and of the blows of 
the axe echoes far and wide. This is 
spring, and the boy can scarcely contain 
his delight that his out-door life is about to 
begin again. 

In the first place the men go about and 
tap the trees, drive in the spouts, and hang 
the buckets under. The boy watches all 
these operations with the greatest interest. 
He wishes that some time when a hole is 
bored in a tree that the sap would spout 
out in a stream as it does when a cider-bar- 
rel is tapped ; but it never does, it only 
drops, sometimes almost in a stream, but 
on the whole slowly, and the boy learns 
that the sweet things of the world have to 
be patiently waited for, and do not usually 
come otherwise than drop by drop. 

Then the camp is to be cleared of snow. 
The shanty is re-covered with boughs. In 
front of it two enormous logs are rolled 
nearly together, and a fire is built between 
them. Forked sticks are set at each end, 
and a long pole is laid on them, and on this 
are hung the great caldron kettles. The 

117 



[BEING A BOY 

huge hogsheads are turned right side up, 
and cleaned out to receive the sap that is 
gathered. And now, if there is a good 
"sap run," the establishment is under full 
headway. 

The great fire that is kindled up is never 
let out, night or day, as long as the season 
lasts. Somebody is always cutting wood 
to feed it ; somebody is busy most of the 
time gathering in the sap ; somebody is re- 
quired to watch the kettles that they do 
not boil over, and to fill them. It is not 
the boy, however ; he is too busy with 
things in general to be of any use in details. 
He has his own little sap-yoke and small 
pails, with which he gathers the sweet 
liquid. He has a little boiling-place of his 
own, with small logs and a tiny kettle. In 
the great kettles the boiling goes on slowly, 
and the liquid, as it thickens, is dipped from 
one to another, until in the end kettle it 
is reduced to sirup, and is taken out to 
cool and settle, until enough is made to 
"sugar off." To " sugar off " is to boil the 
sirup until it is thick enough to crystal- 
lize into sugar. This is the grand event, 

118 




A YOUNG SUGAR-MAKER 



THE SUGAR CAMP 

and it is only done once in two or three 

days. 

But the boy's desire is to "sugar off" 
perpetually. He boils his kettle down as 
rapidly as possible ; he is not particular 
about chips, scum, or ashes ; he is apt to 
burn his sugar ; but if he can get enough 
to make a little wax on the snow, or to 
scrape from the bottom of the kettle with 
his wooden paddle, he is happy. A good 
deal is wasted on his hands and the outside 
of his face and on his clothes, but he does 
not care ; he is not stingy. 

To watch the operations of the big fire 
gives him constant pleasure. Sometimes 
he is left to watch the boiling kettles, with 
a piece of pork tied on the end of a stick, 
which he dips into the boiling mass when 
it threatens to go over. He is constantly 
tasting of it, however, to see if it is not 
almost sirup. He has a long round stick, 
whittled smooth at one end, which he uses 
for this purpose, at the constant risk of 
burning his tongue. The smoke blows in 
his face ; he is grimy with ashes ; he is 
altogether such a mass of dirt, stickiness, 

119 



BEING A EOY 

and sweetness, that his own mother 
would n't know him. 

He likes to boil eggs with the hired man 
in the hot sap ; he likes to roast potatoes 
in the ashes, and he would live in the camp 
day and night if he were permitted. Some 
of the hired men sleep in the bough shanty 
and keep the fire blazing all night. To 
sleep there with them, and awake in the 
night and hear the wind in the trees, and 
see the sparks fly up to the sky, is a perfect 
realization of all the stories of adventures 
he has ever read. He tells the other boys 
afterwards that he heard something in the 
night that sounded very much like a bear. 
The hired man says that he was very much 
scared by the hooting of an owl. 

The great occasions for the boy, though, 
are the times of " sugaring off." Sometimes 
this used to be done in the evening, and 
it was made the excuse for a frolic in the 
camp. The neighbors were invited ; some- 
times even the pretty girls from the village, 
who filled all the woods with their sweet 
voices and merry laughter and little affecta- 
tions of fright. The white snow still lies 

120 



THE SUGAR CAMP 

on all the ground except the warm spot 
about the camp. The tree branches all 
show distinctly in the light of the fire, 
which sends its ruddy glare far into the 
darkness, and lights up the bough shanty, 
the hogsheads, the buckets on the trees, 
and the group about the boiling kettles, 
until the scene is like something taken out 
of a fairy play. If Rembrandt could have 
seen a sugar party in a New England wood, 
he would have made out of its strong con- 
trasts of light and shade one of the finest 
pictures in the world. But Rembrandt was 
not born in Massachusetts ; people hardly 
ever do know where to be born until it is 
too late. Being born in the right place is a 
thing that has been very much neglected. 

At these sugar parties every one was 
expected to eat as much sugar as possible ; 
and those who are practiced in it can eat a 
great deal. It is a peculiarity about eating 
warm maple-sugar that, though you may eat 
so much of it one day as to be sick and 
loathe the thought of it, you will want it the 
next day more than ever. At the " sugar- 
ing off " they used to pour the hot sugar 

121 



BEING A BOY 

upon the snow, where it congealed, without 
crystallizing, into a sort of wax, which I do 
suppose is the most delicious substance 
that was ever invented. And it takes a 
great while to eat it. If one should close 
his teeth firmly on a ball of it, he would be 
unable to open his mouth until it dissolved. 
The sensation while it is melting is very 
pleasant, but one cannot converse. 

The boy used to make a big lump of it 
and give it to the dog, who seized it with 
great avidity, and closed his jaws on it, as 
dogs will on anything. It was funny the 
next moment to see the expression of per- 
fect surprise on the dog's face when he 
found that he could not open his jaws. He 
shook his head ; he sat down in despair ; he 
ran round in a circle ; he dashed into the 
woods and back again. He did everything 
except climb a tree and howl. It would 
have been such a relief to him if he could 
have howled ! But that was the one thing 
he could not do. 

122 



XV 

THE HEART OF NEW ENGLAND 

It is a wonder that every New England 
boy does not turn out a poet, or a mission- 
ary, or a peddler. Most of them used to. 
There is everything in the heart of the New 
England hills to feed the imagination of 
the boy, and excite his longing for strange 
countries. I scarcely know what the sub- 
tle influence is that forms him and attracts 
him in the most fascinating and aromatic of 
all lands, and yet urges him away from all 
the sweet delights of his home to become a 
roamer in literature and in the world, — a 
poet and a wanderer. There is something 
in the soil and the pure air, I suspect, that 
promises more romance than is forthcoming, 
that excites the imagination without satisfy- 
ing it, and begets the desire of adventure. 
And the prosaic life of the sweet home does 
not at all correspond to the boy's dreams of 

123 



BEING A BOY 

the world. In the good old days, I am told, 
the boys on the coast ran away and became 
sailors ; the country boys waited till they 
grew big enough to be missionaries, and 
then they sailed away, and met the coast 
boys in foreign ports. 

John used to spend hours in the top of a 
slender hickory-tree that a little detached 
itself from the forest which crowned the 
brow of the steep and lofty pasture behind 
his house. He was sent to make war on 
the bushes that constantly encroached upon 
the pasture land ; but John had no hostility 
to any growing thing, and a very little 
bushwhacking satisfied him. When he had 
grubbed up a few laurels and young tree- 
sprouts, he was wont to retire into his fa- 
vorite post of observation and meditation. 
Perhaps he fancied that the wide-swaying 
stem to which he clung was the mast of a 
ship ; that the tossing forest behind him 
was the heaving waves of the sea ; and that 
the wind which moaned over the woods and 
murmured in the leaves, and now and then 
sent him a wide circuit in the air, as if he 
had been a blackbird on the tiptop of a 

124 



THE HEART OF NEW ENGLAND 

spruce, was an ocean gale. What life and 
action and heroism there was to him in the 
multitudinous roar of the forest, and what 
an eternity of existence in the monologue 
of the river which brawled far, far below 
him over its wide stony bed ! How the 
river sparkled and danced and went on — 
now in a smooth amber current, now fretted 
by the pebbles, but always with that con- 
tinuous busy song ! John never knew that 
noise to cease, and he doubted not if he 
stayed here a thousand years that same 
loud murmur would fill the air. 

On it went, under the wide spans of the 
old wooden, covered bridge, swirling around 
the great rocks on which the piers stood, 
spreading away below in shallows, and tak- 
ing the shadows of a row of maples that 
lined the green shore. Save this roar, no 
sound reached him, except now and then 
the rumble of a wagon on the bridge, or 
the muffled, far-off voices of some chance 
passers on the road. Seen from this high 
perch, the familiar village, sending its 
brown roofs and white spires up through 
the green foliage, had a strange aspect, and 

125 



BEING A BOY 

was like some town in a book, say a village 
nestled in the Swiss mountains, or some- 
thing in Bohemia. And there, beyond the 
purple hills of Bozrah, and not so far as the 
stony pastures of Zoar, whither John had 
helped drive the colts and young stock in 
the spring, might be perhaps Jerusalem it- 
self. John had himself once been to the 
land of Canaan with his grandfather, when 
he was a very small boy ; and he had once 
seen an actual, no-mistake Jew, a myste- 
rious person, with uncut beard and long 
hair, who sold scythe-snaths in that region, 
and about whom there was a rumor that he 
was once caught and shaved by the indig- 
nant farmers, who apprehended in his long 
locks a contempt of the Christian religion. 
Oh, the world had vast possibilities for 
John. Away to the south, up a vast basin 
of forest, there was a notch in the horizon 
and an opening in the line of woods, where 
the road ran. Through this opening John 
imagined an army might appear, perhaps 
British, perhaps Turks, and banners of red 
and of yellow advance, and a cannon wheel 
about and point its long nose and open on 

126 



THE HEART OF NEW ENGLAND 

the valley. He fancied the army, after this 
salute, winding down the mountain road, 
deploying in the meadows, and giving the 
valley to pillage and to flame. In which 
event his position would be an excellent 
one for observation and for safety. While 
he was in the height of this engagement, 
perhaps the horn would be blown from the 
back porch, reminding him that it was time 
to quit cutting brush and go for the cows. 
As if there were no better use for a warrior 
and a poet in New England than to send 
him for the cows ! 

John knew a boy — a bad enough boy, I 
dare say — who afterwards became a gen- 
eral in the war, and went to Congress and 
got to be a real governor, who used also to be 
sent to cut brush in the back pastures, and 
hated it in his very soul ; and by his wrong 
conduct forecast what kind of a man he 
would be. This boy, as soon as he had 
cut about one brush, would seek for one of 
several holes in the ground (and he was fa- 
miliar with several), in which lived a white- 
and-black animal that must always be name- 
less in a book, but an animal quite capable 

127 



BEING A BOY 

of the most pungent defense of himself. 
This young aspirant to Congress would cut 
a long stick, with a little crotch in the end 
of it, and run it into the hole ; and when 
the crotch was punched into the fur and 
skin of the animal, he would twist the stick 
round till it got a good grip on the skin, 
and then he would pull the beast out ; and 
when he got the white-and-black just out of 
the hole so that his dog could seize him, 
the boy would take to his heels, and leave 
the two to fight it out, content to scent the 
battle afar off. And this boy, who was in 
training for public life, would do this sort 
of thing all the afternoon ; and when the 
sun told him that he had spent long enough 
time cutting brush, he would industriously 
go home as innocent as anybody. There 
are few such boys as this nowadays ; and 
that is the reason why the New England 
pastures are so much overgrown with 
brush. 

John himself preferred to hunt the pug- 
nacious woodchuck. He bore a special 
grudge against this clover-eater, beyond 
the usual hostility that boys feel for any 

128 



THE HEART OF NEW ENGLAND 

wild animal. One day on his way to school 
a woodchuck crossed the road before him, 
and John gave chase. The woodchuck 
scrambled into an orchard and climbed 
a small apple-tree. John thought this a 
most cowardly and unfair retreat, and stood 
under the tree and taunted the animal 
and stoned it. Thereupon the woodchuck 
dropped down on John and seized him by 
the leg of his trousers. John was both en- 
raged and scared by this dastardly attack ; 
the teeth of the enemy went through the 
cloth and met ; and there he hung. John 
then made a pivot of one leg and whirled 
himself around, swinging the woodchuck in 
the air, until he shook him off ; but in his 
departure the woodchuck carried away a 
large piece of John's summer trousers leg. 
The boy never forgot it. And whenever 
he had a holiday he used to expend an 
amount of labor and ingenuity in the pur- 
suit of woodchucks that would have made 
his fortune in any useful pursuit. There 
was a hill-pasture, down on one side of 
which ran a small brook, and this pasture 
was full of woodchuck-holes. It required 

129 



BEING A BOY 

the assistance of several boys to capture a 
woodchuck. It was first necessary by pa- 
tient watching to ascertain that the wood- 
chuck was at home. When one was seen 
to enter his burrow, then all the entries to 
it except one — there are usually three — 
were plugged up with stones. A boy and 
a dog were then left to watch the open 
hole, while John and his comrades went to 
the brook and began to dig a canal, to turn 
the water into the residence of the wood- 
chuck. This was often a difficult feat of 
engineering and a long job. Often it took 
more than half a day of hard labor with 
shovel and hoe to dig the canal. But when 
the canal was finished, and the water began 
to pour into the hole, the excitement began. 
How long would it take to fill the hole and 
drown out the woodchuck ? Sometimes it 
seemed as if the hole were a bottomless pit. 
But sooner or later the water would rise in 
it, and then there was sure to be seen the 
nose of the woodchuck, keeping itself on 
a level with the rising flood. It was pite- 
ous to see the anxious look of the hunted, 
half-drowned creature as it came to the sur- 

130 



THE HEART OF NEW ENGLAND 

face and caught sight of the dog. There 
the dog stood, at the mouth of the hole, 
quivering with excitement from his nose to 
the tip of his tail, and behind him were the 
cruel boys dancing with joy and setting the 
dog on. The poor creature would disap- 
pear in the water in terror ; but he must 
breathe, and out would come his nose again, 
nearer the dog each time. At last the 
water ran out of the hole as well as in, and 
the soaked beast came with it, and made a 
desperate rush. But in a trice the dog had 
him, and the boys stood off in a circle, with 
stones in their hands, to see what they 
called "fair play." They maintained per- 
fect " neutrality " so long as the dog was 
getting the best of the woodchuck ; but if 
the latter was likely to escape, they " inter- 
fered" in the interest of peace and the 
"balance of power," and killed the wood- 
chuck. This is a boy's notion of justice ; 
of course he 'd no business to be a wood- 
chuck, — an "unspeakable woodchuck." 

I used the word "aromatic" in relation 
to the New England soil. John knew very 
well all its sweet, aromatic, pungent, and 

131 



BEING A BOY 

medicinal products, and liked to search for 
the scented herbs and the wild fruits and 
exquisite flowers ; but he did not then 
know, and few do know, that there is no 
part of the globe where the subtle chem- 
istry of the earth produces more that is 
agreeable to the senses than a New Eng- 
land hill-pasture and the green meadow at 
its foot. The poets have succeeded in 
turning our attention from it to the com- 
paratively barren Orient as the land of 
sweet - smelling spices and odorous gums. 
And it is indeed a constant surprise that this 
poor and stony soil elaborates and grows so 
many delicate and aromatic products. 

John, it is true, did not care much for 
anything that did not appeal to his taste and 
smell and delight in brilliant color ; and he 
trod down the exquisite ferns and the won- 
derful mosses without compunction. But 
he gathered from the crevices of the rocks 
the columbine and the eglantine and the 
blue harebell ; he picked the high-flavored 
alpine strawberry, the blueberry, the box- 
berry, wild currants and gooseberries and 

fox-grapes ; he brought home armfuls of 

132 




TREEING A WOODCHUCK 



THE HEART OF NEW ENGLAND 

the pink - and - white laurel and the wild 
honeysuckle ; he dug the roots of the fra- 
grant sassafras and of the sweet -flag ; he 
ate the tender leaves of the wintergreen 
and its red berries ; he gathered the pepper- 
mint and the spearmint ; he gnawed the 
twigs of the black birch ; there was a stout 
fern which he called "brake," which he 
pulled up, and found that the soft end 
"tasted good;" he dug the amber gum 
from the spruce-tree, and liked to smell, 
though he could not chew, the gum of the 
wild cherry ; it was his melancholy duty to 
bring home such medicinal herbs for the 
garret as the goldthread, the tansy, and the 
loathsome " boneset ; " and he laid in for 
the winter, like a squirrel, stores of beech- 
nuts, hazel-nuts, hickory-nuts, chestnuts, 
and butternuts. But that which lives most 
vividly in his memory and most strongly 
draws him back to the New England hills 
is the aromatic sweet-fern : he likes to eat 
its spicy seeds, and to crush in his hands its 
fragrant leaves ; their odor is the unique 
essence of New England. 

i33 



XVI 

John's revival 

The New England country boy of the 
last generation never heard of Christmas. 

There was no such day in his calendar. 
If John ever came across it in his reading, 
he attached no meaning to the word. 

If his curiosity had been aroused, and he 
had asked his elders about it, he might have 
got the dim impression that it was a kind of 
Popish holiday, the celebration of which 
was about as wicked as " card-playing," or 
being a " democrat." John knew a couple 
of desperately bad boys who were reported 
to play " seven-up "in a barn, on the hay- 
mow, and the enormity of this practice 
made him shudder. He had once seen 
a pack of greasy "playing-cards," and it 
seemed to him to contain the quintessence 
of sin. If he had desired to defy all Divine 
law and outrage all human society, he felt 

i34 



JOHN'S REVIVAL 

that he could do it by shuffling them. 
And he was quite right. The two bad boys 
enjoyed in stealth their scandalous pastime, 
because they knew it was the most wicked 
thing they could do. If it had been as sin- 
less as playing marbles, they would n't have 
cared for it. John sometimes drove past 
a brown, tumble-down farm-house, whose 
shiftless inhabitants, it was said, were card- 
playing people ; and it is impossible to de- 
scribe how wicked that house appeared 
to John. He almost expected to see its 
shingles stand on end. In the old New 
England, one could not in any other way 
so express his contempt of all holy and or- 
derly life as by playing cards for amuse- 
ment. 

There was no element of Christmas in 
John's life, any more than there was of 
Easter, and probably nobody about him 
could have explained Easter ; and he escaped 
all the demoralization attending Christmas 
gifts. Indeed, he never had any presents 
of any kind, either on his birthday or any 
other day. He expected nothing that he 
did not earn, or make in the way of " trade " 

i35 



BEING A BOY 

with another boy. He was taught to work 
for what he received. He even earned, as 
I said, the extra holidays of the day after 
the " Fourth " and the day after Thanks- 
giving. Of the free grace and gifts of 
Christmas he had no conception. The sin- 
gle and melancholy association he had with 
it was the quaking hymn which his grand- 
father used to sing in a cracked and quaver- 
ing voice, — 

" While shepherds watched their flocks by night, 
All seated on the ground." 

The " glory " that " shone around " at the 
end of it — the doleful voice always repeat- 
ing, "and glory shone around" — made 
John as miserable as " Hark ! from the 
tombs." It was all one dreary expectation 
of something uncomfortable. It was, in 
short, "religion." You'd got to have it 
some time ; that John believed. But it 
lay in his unthinking mind to put off the 
" Hark ! from the tombs " enjoyment as 
long as possible. He experienced a kind of 
delightful wickedness in indulging his dis- 
like of hymns and of Sunday. 

John was not a model boy, but I cannot 
136 




LOOKING FOR FROGS 



JOHN'S REVIVAL 

exactly define in what his wickedness con- 
sisted. He had no inclination to steal, nor 
much to lie ; and he despised "meanness " 
and stinginess, and had a chivalrous feel- 
ing toward little girls. Probably it never 
occurred to him that there was any virtue 
in not stealing and lying, for honesty and 
veracity were in the atmosphere about him. 
He hated work, and he "got mad" easily ; 
but he did work, and he was always ashamed 
when he was over his fit of passion. In 
short, you couldn't find a much better 
wicked boy than John. 

When the " revival " came, therefore, 
one summer, John was in a quandary. 
Sunday meeting and Sunday school he 
did n't mind ; they were a part of regular 
life, and only temporarily interrupted a 
boy's pleasures. But when there began to 
be evening meetings at the different houses, 
a new element came into affairs. There 
was a kind of solemnity over the commu- 
nity, and a seriousness in all faces. At 
first these twilight assemblies offered a lit- 
tle relief to the monotony of farm-life ; and 
John liked to meet the boys and girls, and 

i37 



BEING A BOY 

to watch the older people coming in, dressed 
in their second best. I think John's imagi- 
nation was worked upon by the sweet and 
mournful hymns that were discordantly 
sung in the stiff old parlors. There was a 
suggestion of Sunday, and sanctity too, in 
the odor of caraway-seed that pervaded the 
room. The windows were wide open also, 
and the scent of June roses came in with 
all the languishing sounds of a summer 
night. All the little boys had a scared 
look, but the little girls were never so 
pretty and demure as in this their suscep- 
tible seriousness. If John saw a boy who 
did not come to the evening meeting, but 
was wandering off with his sling down the 
meadow, looking for frogs, maybe, that boy 
seemed to him a monster of wickedness. 

After a time, as the meetings continued, 
John fell also under the general impression 
of fright and seriousness. All the talk was 
of " getting religion," and he heard over and 
over again that the probability was, if he 
did not get it now he never would. The 
chance did not come often, and, if this offer 
was not improved, John would be given 

138 



JOHN'S REVIVAL 

over to hardness of heart. His obstinacy 
would show that he was not one of the 
elect. John fancied that he could feel his 
heart hardening, and he began to look with 
a wistful anxiety into the faces of the Chris- 
tians to see what were the visible signs of 
being one of the elect. John put on a 
good deal of a manner that he " did n't 
care," and he never admitted his disquiet 
by asking any questions or standing up in 
meeting to be prayed for. But he did care. 
He heard all the time that all he had to do 
was to repent and believe. But there was 
nothing that he doubted, and he was per- 
fectly willing to repent if he could think of 
anything to repent of. 

It was essential, he learned, that he 
should have a " conviction of sin." This he 
earnestly tried to have. Other people, no 
better than he, had it, and he wondered 
why he could n't have it. Boys and girls 
whom he knew were "under conviction," 
and John began to feel not only panicky 
but lonesome. Cynthia Rudd had been 
anxious for days and days, and not able to 
sleep at night, but now she had given her- 

i39 



BEING A BOY 

self up and found peace. There was a kind 
of radiance in her face that struck John 
with awe, and he felt that now there was 
a great gulf between him and Cynthia. 
Everybody was going away from him, and 
his heart was getting harder than ever. 
He could n't feel wicked, all he could do. 
And there was Ed Bates, his intimate 
friend, though older than he, a " whaling," 
noisy kind of boy, who was under conviction 
and sure he was going to be lost. How 
John envied him ! And, pretty soon, Ed 
" experienced religion." John anxiously 
watched the change in Ed's face when he 
became one of the elect. And a change 
there was. And John wondered about 
another thing. Ed Bates used to go trout- 
fishing, with a tremendously long pole, in a 
meadow-brook near the river ; and when 
the trout did n't bite right off Ed would 
" get mad," and as soon as one took hold 
he would give an awful jerk, sending the 
fish more than three hundred feet into the 
air and landing it in the bushes the other 
side of the meadow, crying out, " Gul darn 
ye, I '11 learn ye." And John wondered if 

140 



JOHN'S REVIVAL 

Ed would take the little trout out any more 
gently now. 

John felt more and more lonesome as 
one after another of his playmates came 
out and made a profession. Cynthia (she 
too was older than John) sat on Sunday 
in the singers' seat ; her voice, which was 
going to be a contralto, had a wonderful 
pathos in it for him, and he heard it with a 
heartache. " There she is," thought John, 
"singing away like an angel in heaven, and 
I am left out." During all his after life 
a contralto voice was to John one of his 
most bitter and heart-wringing pleasures. 
It suggested the immaculate scornful, the 
melancholy unattainable. 

If ever a boy honestly tried to work him- 
self into a conviction of sin, John tried. 
And what made him miserable was that 
he could n't feel miserable when everybody 
else was miserable. He even began to 
pretend to be so. He put on a serious and 
anxious look like the others. He pretended 
he did n't care for play ; he refrained from 
chasing chipmunks and snaring suckers ; 
the songs of birds and the bright vivacity 

141 



BEING A BOY 

of the summer time that used to make him 
turn handsprings smote him as a discord- 
ant levity. He was not a hypocrite at all, 
and he was getting to be alarmed that he 
was not alarmed at himself. Every day 
and night he heard that the spirit of the 
Lord would probably soon quit striving 
with him, and leave him out. The phrase 
was that he would "grieve away the Holy 
Spirit." John wondered if he was not do- 
ing it. He did everything to put himself 
in the way of conviction, was constant at 
the evening meetings, wore a grave face, 
refrained from play, and tried to feel anx- 
ious. At length he concluded that he 
must do something. 

One night as he walked home from a 
solemn meeting, at which several of his 
little playmates had " come forward," he 
felt that he could force the crisis. He was 
alone on the sandy road : it was an en- 
chanting summer night ; the stars danced 
overhead, and by his side the broad and 
shallow river ran over its stony bed with a 
loud but soothing murmur that filled all the 
air with entreaty, John did not then know 

142 



JOHN'S REVIVAL 

that it sang, "But I go on forever," yet 
there was in it for him something of the 
solemn flow of the eternal world. When 
he came in sight of the house, he knelt 
down in the dust by a pile of rails and 
prayed. He prayed that he might feel bad, 
and be distressed about himself. As he 
prayed he heard distinctly, and yet not as 
a disturbance, the multitudinous croaking 
of the frogs by the meadow-spring. It was 
not discordant with his thoughts ; it had in 
it a melancholy pathos, as if it were a kind 
of call to the unconverted. What is there 
in this sound that suggests the tenderness 
of spring, the despair of a summer night, 
the desolateness of young love ? Years 
after it happened to John to be at twilight 
at a railway station on the edge of the Ra- 
venna marshes. A little way over the 
purple plain he saw the darkening towers 
and heard "the sweet bells of Imola." 
The Holy Pontiff Pius IX. was born at 
Imola, and passed his boyhood in that 
serene and moist region. As the train 
waited, John heard from miles of marshes 
round about the evening song of millions 

i43 



BEING A BOY 

of frogs, louder and more melancholy and 
entreating than the vesper call of the bells. 
And instantly his mind went back — for 
the association of sound is as subtle as that 
of odor — to the prayer, years ago, by the 
roadside and the plaintive appeal of the un- 
heeded frogs, and he wondered if the little 
Pope had not heard the like importunity, 
and perhaps, when he thought of himself 
as a little Pope, associated his conversion 
with this plaintive sound. 

John prayed, but without feeling any 
worse, and then went desperately into the 
house and told the family that he was in 
an anxious state of mind. This was joyful 
news to the sweet and pious household, 
and the little boy was urged to feel that he 
was a sinner, to repent, and to become that 
night a Christian ; he was prayed over, and 
told to read the Bible, and put to bed with 
the injunction to repeat all the texts of 
Scripture and hymns he could think of. 
John did this, and said over and over the 
few texts he was master of, and tossed 
about in a real discontent now, for he had a 
dim notion that he was playing the hypo- 

144 



JOHN'S REVIVAL 

crite a little. But he was sincere enough in 
wanting to feel, as the other boys and girls 
felt, that he was a wicked sinner. He tried 
to think of his evil deeds ; and one occurred 
to him, indeed, it often came to his mind. 
It was a lie, — a deliberate, awful lie, that 
never injured anybody but himself. John 
knew he was not wicked enough to tell a 
lie to injure anybody else. 

This was the lie. One afternoon at 
school, just before John's class was to 
recite in geography, his pretty cousin, a 
young lady he held in great love and re- 
spect, came in to visit the school. John 
was a favorite with her, and she had come 
to hear him recite. As it happened, John 
felt shaky in the geographical lesson of that 
day, and he feared to be humiliated in the 
presence of his cousin ; he felt embarrassed 
to that degree that he could n't have 
" bounded " Massachusetts. So he stood 
up and raised his hand, and said to the 
schoolma'am, " Please, ma'am, I 've got the 
stomach-ache ; may I go home ? " And 
John's character for truthfulness was so 
high (and even this was ever a reproach to 

145 



BEING A BOY 

him) that his word was instantly believed, 
and he was dismissed without any medical 
examination. For a moment John was de- 
lighted to get out of school so early ; but 
soon his guilt took all the light out of the 
summer sky and the pleasantness out of na- 
ture. He had to walk slowly, without a sin- 
gle hop or jump, as became a diseased boy. 
The sight of a woodchuck at a distance 
from his well-known hole tempted John, 
but he restrained himself, lest somebody 
should see him, and know that chasing 
a woodchuck was inconsistent with the 
stomach-ache. He was acting a miserable 
part, but it had to be gone through with. 
He went home and told his mother the 
reason he had left school, but he added that 
he felt " some " better now. The " some " 
did n't save him. Genuine sympathy was 
lavished on him. He had to swallow a stiff 
dose of nasty "picra," the horror of all 
childhood, and he was put in bed immedi- 
ately. The world never looked so pleasant 
to John, but to bed he was forced to go. He 
was excused from all chores ; he was not 
even to go after the cows. John said he 

146 




FORCED TO GO TO BED 



JOHN'S REVIVAL 

thought he ought to go after the cows, — 
much as he hated the business usually, he 
would now willingly have wandered over 
the world after cows, — and for this heroic 
offer, in the condition he was, he got credit 
for a desire to do his duty ; and this unjust 
confidence in him added to his torture. 
And he had intended to set his hooks that 
night for eels. His cousin came home, 
and sat by his bedside and condoled with 
him ; his schoolma'am had sent word how 
sorry she was for him, John was such a 
good boy. All this was dreadful. He 
groaned in agony. Besides, he was not to 
have any supper ; it would be very danger- 
ous to eat a morsel. The prospect was 
appalling. Never was there such a long 
twilight ; never before did he hear so many 
sounds outdoors that he wanted to investi- 
gate. Being ill without any illness was a 
horrible condition. And he began to have 
real stomach-ache now ; and it ached be- 
cause it was empty. John was hungry 
enough to have eaten the New England 
Primer. But by and by sleep came, and 
John forgot his woes in dreaming that he 

147 



BEING A BOY 

knew where Madagascar was just as easy as 
anything. 

It was this lie that came back to John 
the night he was trying to be affected by 
the revival. And he was very much 
ashamed of it, and believed he would never 
tell another. But then he fell thinking 
whether with the "picra," and the going 
to bed in the afternoon, and the loss of his 
supper, he had not been sufficiently paid 
for it. And in this unhopeful frame of 
mind he dropped off in sleep. 

And the truth must be told, that in the 
morning John was no nearer to realizing 
the terrors he desired to feel. But he was 
a conscientious boy, and would do nothing 
to interfere with the influences of the sea- 
son. He not only put himself away from 
them all, but he refrained from doing al- 
most everything that he wanted to do. 
There came at that time a newspaper, a 
secular newspaper, which had in it a long 
account of the Long Island races, in which 
the famous horse " Lexington " was a 
runner. John was fond of horses, he knew 
about Lexington, and he had looked for- 

148 



JOHN'S REVIVAL 

ward to the result of this race with keen 
interest. But to read the account of it 
now he felt might destroy his seriousness 
of mind, and — in all reverence and sim- 
plicity he felt it — be a means of " grieving 
away the Holy Spirit." He therefore hid 
away the paper in a table drawer, intending 
to read it when the revival should be over. 
Weeks after, when he looked for the news- 
paper, it was not to be found, and John 
never knew what "time" Lexington made, 
nor anything about the race. This was to 
him a serious loss, but by no means so deep 
as another feeling that remained with him ; 
for when his little world returned to its or- 
dinary course, and long after, John had an 
uneasy apprehension of his own separate- 
ness from other people in his insensibility 
to the revival. Perhaps the experience was 
a damage to him ; and it is a pity that there 
was no one to explain that religion for a 
little fellow like him is not a " scheme." 

149 



XVII 

WAR 

Every boy who is good for anything is a 
natural savage. The scientists who want 
to study the primitive man, and have so 
much difficulty in rinding one anywhere in 
this sophisticated age, could n't do better 
than to devote their attention to the com- 
mon country boy. He has the primal, vig- 
orous instincts and impulses of the African 
savage, without any of the vices inherited 
from a civilization long ago decayed, or 
developed in an unrestrained barbaric so- 
ciety. You want to catch your boy young, 
and study him before he has either virtues 
or vices, in order to understand the primi- 
tive man. 

Every New England boy desires (or did 
desire a generation ago, before children 
were born sophisticated, with a large library, 
and with the word " culture " written on 

150 



WAR 

their brows) to live by hunting, fishing, and 
war. The military instinct, which is the 
special mark of barbarism, is strong in him. 
It arises not alone from his love of fighting, 
for the boy is naturally as cowardly as the 
savage, but from his fondness for display, 
— the same that a corporal or a general 
feels in decking himself in tinsel and tawdry 
colors and strutting about in view of the 
female sex. Half the pleasure in going out 
to murder another man with a gun would 
be wanting if one did not wear feathers and 
gold lace and stripes on his pantaloons. 
The law also takes this view of it, and will 
not permit men to shoot each other in plain 
clothes. And the world also makes some 
curious distinctions in the art of killing. To 
kill people with arrows is barbarous ; to kill 
them with smooth-bores and flint-lock mus- 
kets is semi-civilized ; to kill them with 
breech-loading rifles is civilized. That na- 
tion is the most civilized which has the 
appliances to kill the most of another 
nation in the shortest time. This is the 
result of six thousand years of constant 
civilization. By and by, when the nations 

151 



BEING A BOY 

cease to be boys, perhaps they will not 
want to kill each other at all. Some people 
think the world is very old ; but here is an 
evidence that it is very young, and, in fact, 
has scarcely yet begun to be a world. 
When the volcanoes have done spouting, 
and the earthquakes are quaked out, and 
you can tell what land is going to be solid 
and keep its level twenty-four hours, and 
the swamps are filled up, and the deltas of 
the great rivers, like the Mississippi and 
the Nile, become terra ftrma, and men stop 
killing their fellows in order to get their 
land and other property, then perhaps there 
will be a world that an angel wouldn't 
weep over. Now one half the world are em- 
ployed in getting ready to kill the other 
half, some of them by marching about in 
uniform, and the others by hard work to 
earn money to pay taxes to buy uniforms 
and guns. 

John was not naturally very cruel, and it 
was probably the love of display quite as 
much as of fighting that led him into a 
military life ; for he in common with all 
his comrades had other traits of the savage. 

152 



WAR 

One of them was the same passion for 
ornament that induces the African to wear 
anklets and bracelets of hide and of metal, 
and to decorate himself with tufts of hair, 
and to tattoo his body. In John's day there 
was a rage at school among the boys for 
wearing bracelets woven of the hair of the 
little girls. Some of them were wonderful 
specimens of braiding and twist. These 
were not captured in war, but were senti- 
mental tokens of friendship given by the 
young maidens themselves. John's own 
hair was kept so short (as became a warrior) 
that you could n't have made a bracelet out 
of it, or anything except a paint-brush ; but 
the little girls were not under military law, 
and they willingly sacrificed their tresses to 
decorate the soldiers they esteemed. As 
the Indian is honored in proportion to the 
scalps he can display, the boy at John's 
school was held in highest respect who 
could show the most hair trophies on his 
wrist. John himself had a variety that 
would have pleased a Mohawk, fine and 
coarse and of all colors. There were the 
flaxen, the faded straw, the glossy black, 

i53 



BEING A BOY 

the lustrous brown, the dirty yellow, the 
undecided auburn, and the fiery red. Per- 
haps his pulse beat more quickly under the 
red hair of Cynthia Rudd than on account 
of all the other wristlets put together ; it 
was a sort of gold-tried-in-the-fire color to 
John, and burned there with a steady flame. 
Now that Cynthia had become a Christian, 
this band of hair seemed a more sacred if 
less glowing possession (for all detached 
hair will fade in time), and if he had known 
anything about saints he would have ima- 
gined that it was a part of the aureole that 
always goes with a saint. But I am bound 
to say that, while John had a tender feeling 
for this red string, his sentiment was not 
that of the man who becomes entangled 
in the meshes of a woman's hair ; and he 
valued rather the number than the quality 
of these elastic wristlets. 

John burned with as real a military ardor 
as ever inflamed the breast of any slaugh- 
terer of his fellows. He liked to read of 
war, of encounters with the Indians, of any 
kind of wholesale killing in glittering uni- 
form, to the noise of the terribly exciting 

iS4 



WAR 

fife and drum, which maddened the com- 
batants and drowned the cries of the 
wounded. In his future he saw himself a 
soldier with plume and sword and snug- 
fitting, decorated clothes, — very different 
from his somewhat roomy trousers and 
country - cut roundabout, made by Aunt 
Ellis, the village tailoress, who cut out 
clothes, not according to the shape of the 
boy, but to what he was expected to grow 
to, — going where glory awaited him. In 
his observation of pictures, it was the com- 
mon soldier who was always falling and 
dying, while the officer stood unharmed in 
the storm of bullets and waved his sword in 
a heroic attitude. John determined to be 
an officer. 

It is needless to say that he was an ar- 
dent member of the military company of 
his village. He had risen from the grade 
of corporal to that of first lieutenant ; the 
captain was a boy whose father was captain 
of the grown militia company, and conse- 
quently had inherited military aptness and 
knowledge. The old captain was a flam- 
ing son of Mars, whose nose militia war, 

*55 



BEING A BOY 

general training, and New England rum 
had painted with the color of glory and dis- 
aster. He was one of the gallant old sol- 
diers of the peaceful days of our country, 
splendid in uniform, a martinet in drill, ter- 
rible in oaths, a glorious object when he 
marched at the head of his company of 
flintlock muskets, with the American ban- 
ner full high advanced, and the clamorous 
drum defying the world. In this he ful- 
filled his duties of citizen, faithfully teach- 
ing his uniformed companions how to march 
by the left leg, and to get reeling drunk by 
sundown ; otherwise he did n't amount to 
much in the community ; his house was 
unpainted, his fences were tumbled down, 
his farm was a waste, his wife wore an old 
gown to meeting, to which the captain 
never went ; but he was a good trout-fisher, 
and there was no man in town who spent 
more time at the country store and made 
more shrewd observations upon the affairs 
of his neighbors. Although he had never 
been in an asylum any more than he had 
been in war, he was almost as perfect a 
drunkard as he was soldier. He hated the 

156 



WAR 

British, whom he had never seen, as much 
as he loved rum, from which he was never 
separated. 

The company which his son commanded, 
wearing his father's belt and sword, was 
about as effective as the old company, and 
more orderly. It contained from thirty to 
fifty boys, according to the pressure of 
" chores " at home, and it had its great days 
of parade and its autumn manoeuvres, like 
the general training. It was an artillery 
company, which gave every boy a chance 
to wear a sword ; and it possessed a small 
mounted cannon, which was dragged about 
and limbered and unlimbered and fired, to 
the imminent danger of everybody, espe- 
cially of the company. In point of march- 
ing, with all the legs going together, and 
twisting itself up and untwisting, breaking 
into single-file (for Indian fighting) and 
forming platoons, turning a sharp corner, 
and getting out of the way of a wagon, 
circling the town pump, frightening horses, 
stopping short in front of the tavern, with 
ranks dressed and eyes right and left, it 
was the equal of any military organization 

i57 



BEING A BOY 

I ever saw. It could train better than the 
big company, and I think it did more good 
in keeping alive the spirit of patriotism and 
desire to fight. Its discipline was strict. 
If a boy left the ranks to jab a spectator, 
or make faces at a window, or "go for" a 
striped snake, he was " hollered " at no 
end. 

It was altogether a very serious business ; 
there was no levity about the hot and hard 
marching, and as boys have no humor no- 
thing ludicrous occurred. John was very 
proud of his office, and of his ability to 
keep the rear ranks closed up and ready to 
execute any manoeuvre when the captain 
"hollered," which he did continually. He 
carried a real sword, which his grandfather 
had worn in many a militia campaign on 
the village green, the rust upon which John 
fancied was Indian blood; he had various 
red and yellow insignia of military rank 
sewed upon different parts of his clothes, 
and though his cocked hat was of paste- 
board, it was decorated with gilding and 
bright rosettes, and floated a red feather 
that made his heart beat with martial fury 

158 



WAR 

whenever he looked at it. The effect of 
this uniform upon the girls was not a matter 
of conjecture. I think they really cared 
nothing about it, but they pretended to 
think it fine, and they fed the poor boys' 
vanity, — the weakness by which women 
govern the world. 

The exalted happiness of John in this 
military service I dare say was never 
equalled in any subsequent occupation. 
The display of the company in the village 
filled him with the loftiest heroism. There 
was nothing wanting but an enemy to fight, 
but this could only be had by half the com- 
pany staining themselves with elderberry 
juice and going into the woods as Indians, 
to fight the artillery from behind trees with 
bows and arrows, or to ambush it and tom- 
ahawk the gunners. This, however, was 
made to seem very like real war. Tradi- 
tions of Indian cruelty were still fresh in 
Western Massachusetts. Behind John's 
house in the orchard were some old slate 
tombstones, sunken and leaning, which re- 
corded the names of Captain Moses Rice 
and Phineas Arms, who had been killed by 

l S9 



BEING A BOY 

Indians in the last century while at work in 
the meadow by the river, and who slept 
there in the hope of a glorious resurrection. 
Phineas Arms — martial name — was long 
since dust ; and even the mortal part of the 
great Captain Moses Rice had been ab- 
sorbed in the soil, and passed perhaps with 
the sap up into the old but still blooming 
apple-trees. It was a quiet place where 
they lay, but they might have heard — if 
hear they could — the loud, continuous 
roar of the Deerfield, and the stirring of 
the long grass on that sunny slope. There 
was a tradition that years ago an Indian, 
probably the last of his race, had been seen 
moving along the crest of the mountain, 
and gazing down into the lovely valley 
which had been the favorite home of his 
tribe, upon the fields where he grew his 
corn and the sparkling stream whence he 
drew his fish. John used to fancy at times, 
as he sat there, that he could see that red 
spectre gliding among the trees on the 
hill ; and if the tombstone suggested to him 
the trump of judgment, he could not sepa- 
rate it from the war-whoop that had been 

1 60 



WAR 

the last sound in the ear of Phineas Arms. 
The Indian always preceded murder by the 
war-whoop ; and this was an advantage that 
the artillery had in the fight with the elder- 
berry Indians. It was warned in time. If 
there was no war-whoop, the killing did n't 
count ; the artilleryman got up and killed 
the Indian. The Indian usually had the 
worst of it ; he not only got killed by the 
regulars, but he got whipped by the home- 
guard at night for staining himself and his 
clothes with the elderberry. 

But once a year the company had a su- 
perlative parade. This was when the mili- 
tary company from the north part of the 
town joined the villagers in a general mus- 
ter. This was an infantry company, and 
not to be compared with that of the village 
in point of evolutions. There was a great 
and natural hatred between the north town 
boys and the centre. I don't know why, 
but no contiguous African tribes could be 
more hostile. It was all right for one of 
either section to "lick" the other if he 
could, or for half a dozen to "lick" one of 
the enemy if they caught him alone. The 

161 



BEING A BOY 

notion of honor, as of mercy, comes into 
the boy only when he is pretty well grown ; 
to some, neither ever comes. And yet there 
was an artificial military courtesy (some- 
thing like that existing in the feudal age, no 
doubt) which put the meeting of these two 
rival and mutually detested companies on a 
high plane of behavior. It was beautiful to 
see the seriousness of this lofty and studied 
condescension on both sides. For the time, 
everything was under martial law. The 
village company being the senior, its cap- 
tain commanded the united battalion in the 
march, and this put John temporarily into 
the position of captain, with the right to 
march at the head and "holler;" a re- 
sponsibility which realized all his hopes of 
glory. 

I suppose there has yet been discovered 
by man no gratification like that of march- 
ing at the head of a column in uniform on 
parade, — unless perhaps it is marching at 
their head when they are leaving a field of 
battle. John experienced all the thrill of 
this conspicuous authority, and I dare say 
that nothing in his later life has so exalted 

162 



WAR 

him in his own esteem ; certainly nothing 
has since happened that was so important 
as the events of that parade day seemed. 
He satiated himself with all the delights of 
war. 

163 



XVIII 

COUNTRY SCENES 

It is impossible to say at what age a 
New England country boy becomes con- 
scious that his trousers-legs are too short, 
and is anxious about the part of his hair 
and the fit of his woman-made roundabout. 
These harrowing thoughts come to him 
later than to the city lad. At least, a gen- 
eration ago he served a long apprenticeship 
with nature only for a master, absolutely 
unconscious of the artificialities of life. 

But I do not think his early education was 
neglected. And yet it is easy to underesti- 
mate the influences that, unconsciously to 
him, were expanding his mind and nursing 
in him heroic purposes. There was the 
lovely but narrow valley, with its rapid 
mountain stream ; there were the great hills 
which he climbed only to see other hills 
stretching away to a broken and tempting 

164 



COUNTRY SCENES 

horizon ; there were the rocky pastures, 
and the wide sweeps of forest through 
which the winter tempests howled, upon 
which hung the haze of summer heat, over 
which the great shadows of summer clouds 
traveled; there were the clouds them- 
selves, shouldering up above the peaks, 
hurrying across the narrow sky, — the 
clouds out of which the wind came, and the 
lightning and the sudden dashes of rain ; 
and there were days when the sky was in- 
effably blue and distant, a fathomless vault 
of heaven where the hen -hawk and the 
eagle poised on outstretched wings and 
watched for their prey. Can you say how 
these things fed the imagination of the boy, 
who had few books and no contact with 
the great world ? Do you think any city 
lad could have written " Thanatopsis " at 
eighteen ? 

If you had seen John, in his short and 
roomy trousers and ill-used straw hat, pick- 
ing his barefooted way over the rocks along 
the river-bank of a cool morning to see if 
an eel had " got on," you would not have 
fancied that he lived in an ideal world. 

165 



BEING A BOY 

Nor did he consciously. So far as he knew, 
he had no more sentiment than a jack-knife. 
Although he loved Cynthia Rudd devot- 
edly, and blushed scarlet one day when 
his cousin found a lock of Cynthia's flam- 
ing hair in the box where John kept his 
fish-hooks, spruce gum, flagroot, tickets of 
standing at the head, gimlet, billets-doux in 
blue ink, a vile liquid in a bottle to make 
fish bite, and other precious possessions, 
yet Cynthia's society had no attractions for 
him comparable to a day's trout-fishing. 
She was, after all, only a single and a very 
undefined item in his general ideal world, 
and there was no harm in letting his im- 
agination play about her illumined head. 
Since Cynthia had " got religion " and 
John had got nothing, his love was tem- 
pered with a little awe and a feeling of dis- 
tance. He was not fickle, and yet I cannot 
say that he was not ready to construct a 
new romance in which Cynthia should be 
eliminated. Nothing was easier. Perhaps 
it was a luxurious traveling-carriage, drawn 
by two splendid horses in plated harness, 
driven along the sandy road. There were 

1 66 




SLIPPERY WORK 



COUNTRY SCENES 

a gentleman and a young lad on the front 
seat, and on the back seat a handsome, pale 
lady with a little girl beside her. Behind, 
on the rack with the trunk, was a colored 
boy, an imp out of a story-book. John 
was told that the black boy was a slave, 
and that the carriage was from Baltimore. 
Here was a chance for a romance. Slavery, 
beauty, wealth, haughtiness, especially on 
the part of the slender boy on the front 
seat, — here was an opening into a vast 
realm. The high-stepping horses and the 
shining harness were enough to excite 
John's admiration, but these were nothing 
to the little girl. His eyes had never be- 
fore fallen upon that kind of girl ; he had 
hardly imagined that such a lovely creature 
could exist. Was it the soft and dainty 
toilet, was it the brown curls, or the large 
laughing eyes, or the delicate, finely cut 
features, or the charming little figure of 
this fairy-like person ? Was this expression 
on her mobile face merely that of amuse- 
ment at seeing a country boy ? Then John 
hated her. On the contrary, did she see 
in him what John felt himself to be ? Then 

167 



BEING A BOY 

he would go the world over to serve her. 
In a moment he was self-conscious. His 
trousers seemed to creep higher up his legs, 
and he could feel his very ankles blush. 
He hoped that she had not seen the other 
side of him, for in fact the patches were 
not of the exact shade of the rest of the 
cloth. The vision flashed by him in a mo- 
ment, but it left him with a resentful feel- 
ing. Perhaps that proud little girl would 
be sorry some day, when he had become a 
general, or written a book, or kept a store, 
to see him go away and marry another. He 
almost made up his cruel mind on the in- 
stant that he would never marry her, how- 
ever bad she might feel. And yet he 
could n't get her out of his mind for days 
and days, and when her image was present 
even Cynthia in the singers' seat on Sun- 
day looked a little cheap and common. 
Poor Cynthia ! Long before John became 
a general, or had his revenge on the Balti- 
more girl, she married a farmer and was 
the mother of children, red - headed ; and 
when John saw her years after, she looked 
tired and discouraged, as one who has car- 

168 



COUNTRY SCENES 

ried into womanhood none of the romance 
of her youth. 

Fishing and dreaming, I think, were the 
best amusements John had. The middle 
pier of the long covered bridge over the 
river stood upon a great rock, and this rock 
(which was known as the swimming-rock, 
whence the boys on summer evenings dived 
into the deep pool by its side) was a favor- 
ite spot with John when he could get an 
hour or two from the everlasting " chores." 
Making his way out to it over the rocks at 
low water with his fish-pole, there he was 
content to sit and observe the world ; and 
there he saw a great deal of life. He al- 
ways expected to catch the legendary trout 
which weighed two pounds and was believed 
to inhabit that pool. He always did catch 
horned dace and shiners, which he despised, 
and sometimes he snared a monstrous 
sucker a foot and a half long. But in the 
summer the sucker is a flabby fish, and 
John was not thanked for bringing him 
home. He liked, however, to lie with his 
face close to the water and watch the long 
fishes panting in the clear depths, and occa- 

169 



BEING A BOY 

sionally he would drop a pebble near one 
to see how gracefully he would scud away 
with one wave of the tail into deeper water. 
Nothing fears the little brown boy. The 
yellow-bird slants his wings, almost touches 
the deep water before him, and then es- 
capes away under the bridge to the east 
with a glint of sunshine on his back ; the 
fish-hawk comes down with a swoop, dips 
one wing, and, his prey having darted under 
a stone, is away again over the still hill, 
high soaring on even-poised pinions, keep- 
ing an eye perhaps upon the great eagle 
which is sweeping the sky in widening 
circles. 

But there is other life. A wagon rum- 
bles over the bridge, and the farmer and 
his wife, jogging along, do not know that 
they have startled a lazy boy into a mo- 
mentary fancy that a thunder - shower is 
coming up. John can see, as he lies there 
on a still summer day with the fishes and 
the birds for company, the road that comes 
down the left bank of the river, a hot, sandy, 
well-traveled road, hidden from view here 
and there by trees and bushes. The chief 

170 



COUNTRY SCENES 

point of interest, however, is an enormous 
sycamore-tree by the roadside and in front 
of John's house. The house is more than 
a century old, and its timbers were hewed 
and squared by Captain Moses Rice (who 
lies in his grave on the hillside above it), in 
the presence of the Red Man who killed 
him with arrow and tomahawk some time 
after his house was set in order. The gi- 
gantic tree, struck with a sort of leprosy, 
like all its species, appears much older, and 
of course has its tradition. They say it grew 
from a green stake which the first land- 
surveyor planted there for one of his points 
of sight. John was reminded of it years 
after when he sat under the shade of the 
decrepit lime-tree in Freiberg and was told 
that it was originally a twig which the 
breathless and bloody messenger carried in 
his hand when he dropped exhausted in the 
square with the word " Victory ! " on his 
lips, announcing thus the result of the glo- 
rious battle of Morat, where the Swiss in 
1476 defeated Charles the Bold. Under 
the broad but scanty shade of the great 
button-ball tree (as it was called) stood an 

171 



BEING A BOY 

old watering-trough, with its half-decayed 
penstock and well-worn spout pouring for- 
ever cold sparkling water into the overflow- 
ing trough. It is fed by a spring near by, 
and the water is sweeter and colder than 
any in the known world, unless it be the 
well Zem-Zem, as generations of people 
and horses which have drunk of it would 
testify if they could come back. And if 
they could file along this road again, what 
a procession there would be riding down 
the valley ! — antiquated vehicles, rusty 
wagons adorned with the invariable buffalo- 
robe even in the hottest days, lean and 
long-favored horses, frisky colts, drawing 
generation after generation the sober and 
pious saints that passed this way to meet- 
ing and to mill. 

What a refreshment is that water-spout • 
All day long there are pilgrims to it, and 
John likes nothing better than to watch 
them. Here comes a gray horse drawing a 
buggy with two men, — cattle-buyers prob- 
ably. Out jumps a man, down goes the 
check-rein. What a good draught the nag 
takes ! Here comes a long-stepping trotter 

172 



COUNTRY SCENES 

in a sulky ; man in a brown linen coat and 
wide-awake hat, — dissolute, horsey-looking 
man. They turn up, of course. Ah ! there 
is an establishment he knows well ; a sorrel 
horse and an old chaise. The sorrel horse 
scents the water afar off, and begins to 
turn up long before he reaches the trough, 
thrusting out his nose in anticipation of the 
cool sensation. No check to let down ; he 
plunges his nose in nearly to his eyes in 
his haste to get at it. Two maiden ladies 
— unmistakably such, though they appear 
neither " anxious nor aimless " — within 
the scoop-top smile benevolently on the 
sorrel back. It is the deacon's horse, a 
meeting-going nag, with a sedate, leisurely 
jog as he goes ; and these are two of the 
"salt of the earth," — the brevet rank of 
the women who stand and wait, — going 
down to the village store to dicker. There 
come two men in a hurry, horse driven up 
smartly and pulled up short ; but as it is 
rising ground, and the horse does not easily 
reach the water with the wagon pulling 
back, the nervous man in the buggy hitches 
forward on his seat, as if that would carry 

i73 



BEING A BOY 

the wagon a little ahead ! Next, lumber- 
wagon with load of boards ; horse wants to 
turn up, and driver switches him and cries 
" Clang," and the horse reluctantly goes 
by, turning his head wistfully towards the 
flowing spout. Ah ! here comes an equi- 
page strange to these parts, and John stands 
up to look : an elegant carriage and two 
horses ; trunks strapped on behind ; gentle- 
man and boy on front seat and two ladies 
on back seat, — city people. The gentle- 
man descends, unchecks the horses, wipes 
his brow, takes a drink at the spout and 
looks around, evidently remarking upon the 
lovely view, as he swings his handkerchief 
in an explanatory manner. Judicious trav- 
elers ! John would like to know who they 
are. Perhaps they are from Boston, whence 
come all the wonderfully painted pedlers' 
wagons drawn by six stalwart horses, which 
the driver, using no rein, controls with his 
long whip and cheery voice. If so, great 
is the condescension of Boston ; and John 
follows them with an undefined longing as 
they drive away toward the mountains of 
Zoar. Here is a footman, dusty and tired, 

174 



COUNTRY SCENES 

who comes with lagging steps. He stops, 
removes his hat, as he should to such a 
tree, puts his mouth to the spout, and takes 
a long pull at the lively water. And then 
he goes on, perhaps to Zoar, perhaps to a 
worse place. 

So they come and go all the summer after- 
noon ; but the great event of the day is 
the passing down the valley of the majestic 
stage-coach, the vast yellow-bodied, rattling 
vehicle. John can hear a mile off the shak- 
ing of chains, traces, and whifrletrees, and 
the creaking of its leathern braces, as the 
great bulk swings along piled high with 
trunks. It represents to John, somehow, 
authority, government, the right of way; 
the driver is an autocrat, — everybody must 
make way for the stage-coach. It almost 
satisfies the imagination, this royal vehicle ; 
one can go in it to the confines of the world, 
— to Boston and to Albany. 

There were other influences that I dare 
say contributed to the boy's education. I 
think his imagination was stimulated by a 
band of gypsies who used to come every 
summer and pitch a tent on a little road- 

i75 



BEING A BOY 

side patch of green turf by the river-bank, 
not far from his house. It was shaded by 
elms and butternut - trees, and a long spit 
of sand and pebbles ran out from it into 
the brawling stream. Probably they were 
not a very good kind of gypsy, although the 
story was that the men drank and beat 
the women. John did n't know much about 
drinking ; his experience of it was confined 
to sweet cider ; yet he had already set him- 
self up as a reformer, and joined the Cold 
Water Band. The object of this Band was 
to walk in a procession under a banner that 
declared, — 

" So here we pledge perpetual hate 
To all that can intoxicate ; " 

and wear a badge with this legend, and 
above it the device of a well-curb with a 
long sweep. It kept John and all the lit- 
tle boys and girls from being drunkards 
till they were ten or eleven years of age ; 
though perhaps a few of them died mean- 
time from eating loaf -cake and pie and 
drinking ice-cold water at the celebrations 
of the Band. 

The gypsy camp had a strange fascina- 
176 



COUNTRY SCENES 

tion for John, mingled of curiosity and fear. 
Nothing more alien could come into the 
New England life than this tatterdema- 
lion band. It was hardly credible that 
here were actually people who lived out- 
doors, who slept in their covered wagon or 
under their tent, and cooked in the open 
air; it was a visible romance transferred 
from foreign lands and the remote times of 
the story-books ; and John took these city 
thieves, who were on their annual foray 
into the country, trading and stealing 
horses and robbing hen - roosts and corn- 
fields, for the mysterious race who for thou- 
sands of years have done these same things 
in all lands, by right of their pure blood 
and ancient lineage. John was afraid to 
approach the camp when any of the scowl- 
ing and villanous men were lounging about, 
pipes in mouth ; but he took more courage 
when only women and children were visi- 
ble. The swarthy, black-haired women in 
dirty calico frocks were anything but attrac- 
tive, but they spoke softly to the boy, and 
told his fortune, and wheedled him into 
bringing them any amount of cucumbers 

177 



BEING A BOY 

and green corn in the course of the season. 
In front of the tent were planted in the 
ground three poles that met together at the 
top, whence depended a kettle. This was 
the kitchen, and it was sufficient. The fuel 
for the fire was the driftwood of the stream. 
John noted that it did not require to be 
sawed into stove-lengths ; and, in short, 
that the " chores " about this establishment 
were reduced to the minimum. And an 
older person than John might envy the 
free life of these wanderers, who paid 
neither rent nor taxes, and yet enjoyed all 
the delights of nature. It seemed to the 
boy that affairs would go more smoothly in 
the world if everybody would live in this 
simple manner. Nor did he then know, or 
ever after find out, why it is that the world 
only permits wicked people to be Bohe- 
mians. 

178 



XIX 

A CONTRAST TO THE NEW ENGLAND BOY 

One evening at vespers in Genoa, at- 
tracted by a burst of music from the swing- 
ing curtain of the doorway, I entered a 
little church much frequented by the com- 
mon people. An unexpected and exceed- 
ingly pretty sight rewarded me. 

It was All-Souls' Day. In Italy almost 
every day is set apart for some festival, or 
belongs to some saint or another; and I 
suppose that when leap-year brings around 
the extra day, there is a saint ready to 
claim the 29th of February. Whatever 
the day was to the elders, the evening was 
devoted to the children. The first thing 
I noticed was, that the quaint old church 
was lighted up with innumerable wax- 
tapers, — an uncommon sight, for the dark- 
ness of a Catholic church in the evening is 
usually relieved only by a candle here and 

179 



BEING A BOY 

there, and by a blazing pyramid of them 
on the high altar. The use of gas is held 
to be a vulgar thing all over Europe, and 
especially unfit for a church or an aristo- 
cratic palace. 

Then I saw that each taper belonged to 
a little boy or girl, and the groups of chil- 
dren were scattered all about the church. 
There was a group by every side altar and 
chapel, all the benches were occupied by 
knots of them, and there were so many 
circles of them seated on the pavement 
that I could with difficulty make my way 
among them. There were hundreds of 
children in the church, all dressed in their 
holiday apparel, and all intent upon the illu- 
mination, which seemed to be a private 
affair to each one of them. 

And not much effect had their tapers 
upon the darkness of the vast vaults above 
them. The tapers were little spiral coils 
of wax, which the children unrolled as fast 
as they burned, and when they were tired 
of holding them they rested them on the 
ground and watched the burning. I stood 
some time by a group of a dozen seated in 

1 80 




THE OLD WATERING TROUGH 



A CONTRAST TO THE NEW ENGLAND BOY 

a corner of the church. They had massed 
all the tapers in the centre and formed a 
ring about the spectacle, sitting with their 
legs straight out before them and their 
toes turned up. The light shone full in 
their happy faces, and made the group, en- 
veloped otherwise in darkness, like one of 
Correggio's pictures of children or angels. 
Correggio was a famous Italian artist of the 
sixteenth century, who painted cherubs 
like children who were just going to 
heaven, and children like cherubs who had 
just come out of it. But then, he had the 
Italian children for models, and they get 
the knack of being lovely very young. An 
Italian child finds it as easy to be pretty as 
an American child to be good. 

One could not but be struck with the pa- 
tience these little people exhibited in their 
occupation, and the enjoyment they got 
out of it. There was no noise ; all con- 
versed in subdued whispers and behaved 
in the most gentle manner to each other, 
especially to the smallest, and there were 
many of them so small that they could only 
toddle about by the most judicious exercise 

181 



BEING A BOY 

of their equilibrium. I do not say this by 
way of reproof to any other kind of children. 

These little groups, as I have said, were 
scattered all about the church ; and they 
made with their tapers little spots of light, 
which looked in the distance very much 
like Correggio's picture which is at Dres- 
den, — the Holy Family at Night, and the 
light from the Divine Child blazing in the 
faces of all the attendants. Some of the 
children were infants in the nurse's arms, 
but no one was too small to have a taper, 
and to run the risk of burning its fingers. 

There is nothing that a baby likes more 
than a lighted candle, and the church has 
understood this longing in human nature, 
and found means to gratify it by this festi- 
val of tapers. 

The groups do not all remain long in 
place, you may imagine ; there is a good 
deal of shifting about, and I see little strag- 
glers wandering over the church, like fairies 
lighted by fire-flies. Occasionally they form 
a little procession and march from one altar 
to another, the lights twinkling as they go. 

But all this time there is music pouring 

182 



A CONTRAST TO THE NEW ENGLAND BOY 

out of the organ-loft at the end of the 
church, and flooding all its spaces with its 
volume. In front of the organ is a choir 
of boys, led by a round-faced and jolly 
monk, who rolls about as he sings, and lets 
the deep bass noise rumble about a long 
time in his stomach before he pours it out 
of his mouth. I can see the faces of all of 
them quite well, for each singer has a can- 
dle to light his music-book. 

And next to the monk stands the boy, 
— the handsomest boy in the whole world 
probably at this moment. I can see now 
his great, liquid, dark eyes and his exqui- 
site face, and the way he tossed back his 
long waving, hair when he struck into his 
part. He resembled the portraits of Ra- 
phael, when that artist was a boy ; only I 
think he looked better than Raphael, and 
without trying, for he seemed to be a spon- 
taneous sort of boy. And how that boy 
did sing ! He was the soprano of the choir, 
and he had a voice of heavenly sweetness. 
When he opened his mouth and tossed back 
his head, he filled the church with exquisite 
melody. 

183 



BEING A BOY 

He sang like a lark, or like an angel. As 
we never heard an angel sing, that compari- 
son is not worth much. I have seen pictures 
of angels singing, — there is one by Jan 
and Hubert Van Eyck in the gallery at 
Berlin, — and they open their mouths like 
this boy, but I can't say as much for their 
singing. The lark, which you very likely 
never heard either, — for larks are as scarce 
in America as angels, — is a bird that 
springs up from the meadow and begins to 
sing as he rises in a spiral flight, and the 
higher he mounts the sweeter he sings, 
until you think the notes are dropping out 
of heaven itself, and you hear him when he 
is gone from sight, and you think you hear 
him long after all sound has ceased. 

And yet this boy sang better than a lark, 
because he had more notes and a greater 
compass and more volume, although he 
shook out his voice in the same gleesome 
abundance. 

I am sorry that I cannot add that this rav- 
ishingly beautiful boy was a good boy. He 
was probably one of the most mischievous 
boys that was ever in an organ-loft. All 

184 



A CONTRAST TO THE NEW ENGLAND BOY 

the time that he was singing the vespers he 
was skylarking like an imp. While he was 
pouring out the most divine melody, he 
would take the opportunity of kicking the 
shins of the boy next to him ; and while he 
was waiting for his part he would kick out 
behind at any one who was incautious 
enough to approach him. There never was 
such a vicious boy ; he kept the whole loft 
in a ferment. When the monk rumbled 
his bass in his stomach, the boy cut up 
monkey-shines that set every other boy into 
a laugh, or he stirred up a row that set 
them all at fisticuffs. 

And yet this boy was a great favorite. 
The jolly monk loved him best of all, and 
bore with his wildest pranks. When he 
was wanted to sing his part and was sky- 
larking in the rear, the fat monk took him 
by the ear and brought him forward ; and 
when he gave the boy's ear a twist, the boy 
opened his lovely mouth and poured forth 
such a flood of melody as you never heard. 
And he did n't mind his notes ; he seemed 
to know his notes by heart, and could sing 
and look off like a nightingale on a bough. 

185 



BEING A BOY 

He knew his power, that boy ; and he 
stepped forward to his stand when he 
pleased, certain that he would be forgiven 
as soon as he began to sing. And such 
spirit and life as he threw into the perform- 
ance, rollicking through the Vespers with a 
perfect abandon of carriage, as if he could 
sing himself out of his skin if he liked ! 

While the little angels down below were 
pattering about with their wax tapers, keep- 
ing the holy fire burning, suddenly the 
organ stopped, the monk shut his book with 
a bang, the boys blew out the candles, and 
I heard them all tumbling down stairs in a 
gale of noise and laughter. The beautiful 
boy I saw no more. 

About him plays the light of tender 
memory ; but were he twice as lovely, I 
could never think of him as having either 
the simple manliness or the good fortune 
of the New England boy. 

186 



CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS, U. S. A. 

ELECTROTYPED AND PRINTED BY 

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